Distance from Edge Determines Fruit-Feeding Butterfly Community Diversity in Afrotropical Forest Fragments

Distance from edge determines fruit-feeding butterfly community diversity in afrotropical forest fragments.

We studied the impact of forest edges on the fruit-feeding butterfly communities of three forest remnants in Ghana, West Africa. Community diversity was assessed using traps baited with fermenting banana. Two 200-m, edge-to-interior transects of five traps each were established in each forest. Sampling spanned 1 yr for a total of 180-210 trap days per site and resulted in 2,634 specimens and 56...

Fruit-feeding Butterfly Communities of Forest ‘islands’ in Ghana: Survey Completeness and Correlates of Spatial Diversity

We conducted a year long survey of the fruit-feeding butterfly fauna of sacred forest groves and forest reserves of Ghana. About one-third of all fruit-feeding species recorded for Ghana were trapped, but our total sample had not yet reached the point of species saturation. Rarefied species richness was higher in the larger forest reserves than in the small sacred groves, as predicted by specie...

Relative contribution of neutral and deterministic processes in shaping fruit‐feeding butterfly assemblages in Afrotropical forests

The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography has gained the status of a quantitative null model for explaining patterns in ecological (meta)communities. The theory assumes that individuals of trophically similar species are functionally equivalent. We empirically evaluate the relative contribution of neutral and deterministic processes in shaping fruit-feeding butterfly assemblag...

Species diversity in vertical, horizontal, and temporal dimensions of a fruit-feeding butterfly community in an Ecuadorian rainforest

To test the hypotheses that fruit-feeding nymphalid butterflies are randomly distributed in space and time, a community of fruit-feeding nymphalid butterflies was sampled at monthly intervals for one year by trapping 6690 individuals of 130 species in the canopy and understory of four forest habitats: primary, higraded, secondary, and edge. The overall species abundance distribution was well de...

Effect of Tree-Fall Gaps on Fruit-Feeding Nymphalid Butterfly Assemblages in a Peruvian Rain Forest