Preliminary Evaluation of Butterfly Diversity and Rural Agriculture in Montane Costa Rica

Abstract

Agriculture continues to expand in the tropics, capturing a subset of original biodiversity. Here, butterfly diversity was sampled in four land uses resulting from montane Neotropical agriculture: a forest fragment, a coffee plantation, a banana grove, and a cattle pasture. Butterflies were sampled in both traps baited with rotting fruit and visual transects during the dry season in the tropical premontane moist forest life zone near Monteverde, Costa Rica. The samples were dominated by Cissia spp., overshadowing the diversity and evenness, therefore statistical analyses were run with and without the species. Diversity was highest in the coffee, followed by the forest, then pasture, and banana. Excluding Cissia spp., diversity increased in all sites but remained highest in the coffee, then banana grove, followed by the forest fragment, with the pasture the least diverse. Coffee displayed the highest diversity presumably because it had the highest structural diversity that still allowed abundant light. The pasture may have the lowest diversity because of low structural diversity and high winds. Forest-dwelling butterfly species were less common as habitats lost structural diversity, indicating that while highest local diversity can occur with agriculture, regional species diversity may suffer.