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Butterfly communities respond to structural changes in forest restorations and regeneration in lowland Atlantic Forest, Paraná, Brazil

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Abstract

The Atlantic forest is one of the most diverse biomes on Earth but human activities are transforming this ecosystem into one of the most endangered. Most remnant old-growth rainforest is embedded within a mosaic of regenerating forest, tree plantations, pastures, and agricultural production. This has left a large percentage of the region’s endemic species threatened with extinction. Butterflies are considered as sensitive indicators of ecological conditions, especially in the Atlantic forest. This community can provide a window into animal response to restoration and how recovering habitats are used by native animal communities. The primary goal of this paper was to determine if butterfly communities respond to measures of structural recovery in naturally regenerating and re-forested pastures, and if this response increases the similarity of recovering butterfly communities relative to those of intact forests. Butterfly communities were sampled using two sampling methodologies, passive bait trapping and timed meander counts. These data sets were combined and correlated to assessment of habitat structure. We found that butterfly communities respond rapidly to structural changes in habitats as forest structure recovers on abandoned and restored pastures. While many species of mature forest inhabiting butterflies use regenerating forests as habitat, our young forests also retained an almost intact community of ruderal pasture inhabiting butterflies as well, indicating that these habitats retain many features of highly disturbed pastures. We suggest that measures of beta-diversity, which can be used to assess convergence in community structure, are far superior to the alpha-diversity measures that are typically used for assessing restoration recovery.

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Acknowledgements

Staff at the Sociedade de Pesquisa em Vida Selvagem e Educação Ambiental welcomed and facilitated our field work and were gracious hosts during our prolonged visits. This work was made possible by Leandro Baumgarten, Science Manager for The Nature Conservancy’s program in Brazil.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Nature Conservancy, 620 E Ohio Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    John Shuey

  2. The Nature Conservancy, 5690 Chase Street, Merrillville, IN, 46410, USA

    Paul Labus

  3. Laboratorio de Estudos em Lepidoptera Neotropical, Departamento de Zoologia, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Caixa Postal 19020, Curitiba, Paraná, 81531-980, Brazil

    Eduardo Carneiro, Fernando Maia Silva Dias, Luis Anderson R. Leite & Olaf H. H. Mielke

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  1. John Shuey
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  2. Paul Labus
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  6. Olaf H. H. Mielke
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Correspondence to John Shuey.

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Shuey, J., Labus, P., Carneiro, E. et al. Butterfly communities respond to structural changes in forest restorations and regeneration in lowland Atlantic Forest, Paraná, Brazil. J Insect Conserv 21, 545–557 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-017-9994-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-017-9994-y

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