Abstract
The accelerating expansion of human populations and associated economic activity across the globe have made maintaining large, intact natural areas increasingly challenging. The difficulty of preserving large intact landscapes in the presence of growing human populations has led to a growing emphasis on landscape approaches to biodiversity conservation with a complementary strategy focused on improving conservation in human‐modified landscapes. This, in turn, is leading to intense debate about the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation in human‐modified landscapes and approaches to better support biodiversity in those landscapes. Here, we compared butterfly abundance, alpha richness, and beta diversity in human‐modified landscapes (urban, sugarcane) and natural, forested areas to assess the conservation value of human‐modified landscapes within the Wet Tropics bioregion of Australia. We used fruit‐baited traps to sample butterflies and analyzed abundance and species richness in respective land uses over a one‐year period. We also evaluated turnover and spatial variance components of beta diversity to determine the extent of change in temporal and spatial variation in community composition. Forests supported the largest numbers of butterflies, but were lowest in each, alpha species richness, beta turnover, and the spatial beta diversity. Sugarcane supported higher species richness, demonstrating the potential for conservation at local scales in human‐modified landscapes. In contrast, beta diversity was highest in urban areas, likely driven by spatial and temporal variation in plant composition within the urban landscapes. Thus, while improving conservation on human‐modified landscapes may improve local alpha richness, conserving variation in natural vegetation is critical for maintaining high beta diversity.
Highlights
In response to a growing and expanding human population, natural habitats and the landscape as a whole are increasingly being shaped by human activities (Venter et al, 2016). McGill, Dornelas, Gotelli, and Magurran (2015) identified five major ways that human activi‐ ties impact biodiversity: land‐cover change, chemical release, over‐ harvesting, climate change, and species transport/invasion
Our study was conducted in the coastal lowlands of the northern half of the Wet Tropics bioregion of Far North Queensland, from Daintree in the north to Wooroonooran in the south (Supporting Information Appendix S1)
It is unclear why beta diversity was lower in forest habitats, but it may be related to the fact that we focused on variation within an eco‐region, rather than among eco‐regions
Summary
In response to a growing and expanding human population, natural habitats and the landscape as a whole are increasingly being shaped by human activities (Venter et al, 2016). McGill, Dornelas, Gotelli, and Magurran (2015) identified five major ways that human activi‐ ties impact biodiversity: land‐cover change, chemical release, over‐ harvesting, climate change, and species transport/invasion. We investigated butterfly abundance, rich‐ ness, evenness, and diversity in the Wet Tropics bioregion, in three different land uses: one natural (forested) areas and two human‐ modified (urban and agricultural) areas. Given the ability of farm margins to support butterfly pop‐ ulations in tropical habitats (e.g., Koh, 2008), we hypothesized that agricultural areas may host a diverse group of butterflies We expected these populations to be lower in beta diversity than for‐ ests and urban areas, given the low variation in plant composition in sugarcane farms, including the weedy field margins that support butterflies. Given that sugarcane is generally irrigated year‐round and mowed regularly in the study region, we expected to find little temporal variation in species richness and abundance or little turnover in that landscape
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