Abstract
This study deals with the habitat requirements and (meta)population ecology of the Birdwing Butterfly Troides aeacus in the Xiaolongshan forest area and the Baishuijiang Natural Reserve of Gansu Province, China. The more descriptive components mainly summarize the biology and habitat requirements of the species. A detailed account is given of 3-year presence/absence dynamics in a suspected metapopulation, which consists of ten habitat patches. By means of GLM a habitat model was developed which has shown that the abundance of Troides aeacus will increase with both the number of larval host plants and adult nectar plants, while it will decrease with denser forest canopy structure. The hierarchical partitioning of the explained variance indicated that the independent effects of the number of nectar plants and the forest canopy density are the most important factors, while the explanatory power of the number of host plants was minimal. Habitat loss and degradation are the most severe threats to Troides aeacus populations in the study area. These are mainly due to continuous human activities such as destruction of forest for reclamation, grazing, mine exploitation, and cutting of firewood, but also herbicide application and sometimes even certain types of afforestation. While the availability of host plants is a clear pre-requisite for the survival of the species, conservation should be most efficient through an increase in the abundance of nectar plants as well as through the avoidance of complete forest cover (through an appropriate cutting management which would also promote growth of the host plants). As environmental threats are quite similar in the entire Southern Gansu region, we expect that the implementation of such butterfly conservation measures should have positive impacts on many other components of biodiversity.
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Notes
Within mark-release-recapture studies in Bifeng valley from June to July in 2002 and 2003 we captured a total of 75 Troides aeacus individuals (16 females and 59 males). Due to the low number of recaptures we could not make any population estimates. However, as we could capture many of the butterflies we have seen (females easier than males, thus much less females present than males), the study population can be assumed to be extremely small and surely below the population size often observed as MVP for butterflies (Schtickzelle and Baguette 2009).
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Acknowledgments
In process of this research we have received intensive support from Mr. Wang Hongjian, who works for the management bureau of the Baishuijiang natural reserve, Gansu province and from Mr. Yuan Shiyun who works for the Xiaolongshan Forestry experimental bureau, Gansu province. Support for X. L. also was generously received from the scientific enterprise project of Gansu province Qs022-C31-069. O. S. and J. S. have received support from the FP6 projects ALARM (www.alarmproject.net; GOCE-CT-2003-506675; Settele et al. 2005) and MACIS (www.macis-project.net; 044399 (SSPI); Kühn et al. 2008).
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Li, Xs., Luo, Yq., Zhang, Yl. et al. On the conservation biology of a Chinese population of the birdwing Troides aeacus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae). J Insect Conserv 14, 257–268 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-009-9254-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-009-9254-x