doctoralThesis
Padrões ecológicos e diversidade de borboletas em florestas tropicais secas
Fecha
2020-08-31Registro en:
SILVA, Larissa Nascimento dos Santos. Padrões ecológicos e diversidade de borboletas em florestas tropicais secas. 2020. 192f. Tese (Doutorado em Ecologia) - Centro de Biociências, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2020.
Autor
Silva, Larissa Nascimento dos Santos
Resumen
Dry ecosystems are biodiverse and are distributed across the globe, with climatic
seasonality being a strong environmental characteristic, which imposes adaptive
challenges on the seasons and physiognomic variations on organisms. However,
studies on large-scale taxonomic and ecological comparisons being scarce. The
objective of this work was to survey the research effort on butterflies (Lepidoptera:
Papilionoidea and Hesperioidea), to identify the main thematic and geographical
research gaps, in dry tropical ecosystems, and we compare the geographic distribution
of butterfly richness. For this, we use scientometric methodology, using keywords in
English encompassing dry forests and savannas (Pennington et al. 2018) and the
taxon butterflies, on the ISI Web of Knowledge platform. We collected information from
167 screened and mapped studies, published between 1981 and 2019. Most of the
work was carried out in Brazil (n = 41, 24% of the total), Mexico (n = 21, 13%) , Malawi
(n = 19, 11%) and Australia (n = 19, 11%), with 71% of studies (n = 118) on a local
scale and 16.8% (n = 28), regional. Ecological interactions (n = 31, 18.6%) and life
history (n = 23, 13.8%) were the main themes, and Nymphalidae (n = 61, 36.5%),
Hesperiidae and Lycaenidae (both n = 13, 7.8%) the most studied families. We find,
mainly in the Americas, inventories, ecological studies of communities and
interactions, such as myrmecophilia and host plants associated with Lycaenidae and
Pieridae. While several phenological and evolutionary studies have been tested with
Satyrinae species in the African region, and seasonal and biogeographic studies in the
Australian region, including comparisons with other taxa, such as birds and mammals.
Some of the richest areas are in Mexico and Australia. Comparing the richness of
butterfly species (Papilionoidea) between zoogeogradic domains, Central America
differs from the others in number of species, with an average of 261 species (Nearctic
domain) and 105 species (Panamanian domain), followed by African savannas (136.4
species). Dry Forests are richer in butterfly species (average 138.2) than Savanas
(115.3), corroborating our hypothesis of greater wealth in more heterogeneous and
less unstable environments. Tropical Dry Forests are highly seasonal and rich in
adaptive processes. Considering the less addressed themes, fragmentation (n = 4,
2.4%) and anthropic impacts (n = 3, 1.8%), we warn of the need for research on
environmental changes at different scales, as well as the effects of forest fragmentation
on biological communities and conservation.