Butterfly community monitoring on City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks property: analysis of the changes in species richness and diversity from 2002 to 2016
Date
2017-05
Authors
Keeley, Will, author
Colorado Natural Heritage Program, author
Colorado Natural Heritage Program, publisher
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Butterfly populations are naturally patchy and undergo extinctions and recolonizations. Recent published research indicates that butterfly fauna show a net loss over time in species richness and diversity, when populations are subject to anthropogenic disturbances like development, climate change, and invasion by nonnative plant species. This document reports on an analysis of changes in butterfly community over time at 18 transects, distributed in six habitat types, and sampled in five different years: 2002, 2007, 2008, 2015, and 2016. Species richness and diversity was greatest in earlier years of the study and all habitats studied exhibited declining trends in both richness and Shannon’s diversity index H over time (richness, m = -0.8; Shannon diversity, m = -0.07). There were also differences in diversity among the habitats sampled with the Forest Riparian habitat type supporting more butterfly species, while the Prairie Riparian habitat type had lower diversity. This analysis represents a snapshot of the butterfly community among time periods, rather than a comprehensive survey making it difficult to identify the causes for the observed patterns. Some factors that could explain the patterns observed among habitats include the greater quality of the native plant community at higher elevations, a greater diversity of plants in riparian areas compared to adjacent uplands, exurban development, more intensive historical and recent grazing of riparian habitats at lower elevation, the effects of recreation, variability in climate among years, and climate change. Conserving butterfly communities of the study area may require increasing the size of protected areas, improving the quality of their habitat, managing nonnative plants, and increasing native plant diversity. Additionally, understanding that regional butterfly diversity is dependent upon maintaining habitat continuity at the landscape scale between butterfly metapopulations is important.
Description
Prepared for: City of Boulder, Open Space and Mountain Parks.
Prepared by Colorado Natural Heritage Program in collaboration with Will Keeley, Wildlife Ecologist, Open Space and Mountain Parks.
2017 May.
Includes bibliographical references.
Prepared by Colorado Natural Heritage Program in collaboration with Will Keeley, Wildlife Ecologist, Open Space and Mountain Parks.
2017 May.
Includes bibliographical references.
Rights Access
Subject
butterfly
diversity
species richness
urbanization
time
vegetation heterogeneity