Terrestrial ecosystems across the world experience large-scale and widespread urbanization, causing a sharp decline,įragmentation and segregation of natural landscapes.
Besides providing the basis for further ecological studies, our results will contribute to the crucial need of scientific data that is lacking, but critically important, for adequate urban management and planning, as well as environmental education. Notably, higher butterfly abundances tended to be recorded near highly vegetated areas and along city borders. Thus, our results suggest that there are at least 1.8 butterfly individuals per capita in Xalapa. The interpolation procedures showed to be robust and reliable, and up to some extent conservative.
Our calculations added an average of 1,077,537 (± SE 172) butterfly individuals that dwelt in Xalapa in the surveyed space and time. In this study, we estimated the number of butterflies that live within a neotropical medium-sized city (Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico) using a robust interpolation procedure (ordinary kriging). Among urban wildlife groups, butterflies have been used as biological indicators due to their high sensitivity to environmental changes. Urbanization poses severe threats to biodiversity thus, there is an urge to understand urban areas and their biological, physical, and social components if we aim to integrate sustainable practices as part of their processes. Connecting forest patches near cities with ecological protected areas would have a positive impact on butterfly diversity. At the level of the landscape, at small scale (50 and 100 m) arboreal vegetation cover (%VA) was the most important variable, meanwhile, as the scale increased the variables related to urbanization such as construction cover, number of pedestrian and distance to the center of the city became increasingly important. Local variables accounted for 74.9% of the variance in the abundance data, with mean environmental temperature, relative humidity, the number of pedestrians and plant cover the most important variables. As expected, species turnover was greatest between forests and the urban area (Whittaker's species turnover = 50.88). Diversity and evenness were low in the most urbanized environments, indicating that urban butterfly ensembles are dominated by few abundant species. The AEP and forests had the highest (38 species) and lowest (21 species) richness respectively. Species accumulation curves indicate that sampling completeness was 91% fifty species were recorded, with Satyrinae: Satyrini the richest group (15 species), and Heliconiinae the poorest subfamily (8 species). Butterflies were sampled at 300 m length and 10 m wide transects rooted-fruit baited traps and intentional sampling. We evaluated butterfly diversity in two Mexican cities by establishing four categories of urbanization: urban, suburban, areas of ecological protection (AEP) and forest. Latin America is one of the most urbanized developing regions, however little is known about the biodiversity of its cities and the way this biodiversity is affected by landscape and local variables.
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