Declines of prairie butterflies in the midwestern USA
By S. Swengel, D. Schlicht, F. Olsen, A. Swengel. Journal of Insect Conservation, 2011
106 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Tallgrass prairie butterfly surveys in recent decades in four states in the USA indicate numerous declines of prairie-specialist butterflies including Speyeria idalia, Oarisma poweshiek, Atrytone arogos, Hesperia dacotae, and H. ottoe in fire-managed preserves, including large high-quality ones. These results replicate previous findings, indicating that upon initiation of conservation action, both cessation of prior management and inception of new management affect specialists negatively and that butterfly declines can be as great on reserves as non-reserves. Results at Wisconsin sites with species-specific management protocols, including permanent non-fire refugia, were more favorable for the specialists (S. idalia, Lycaeides melissa samuelis) the protocols were specifically designed to benefit. Butterfly declines after preservation will likely continue unless the conservation approach changes to include consideration of individual species’ required resources and management tolerances. The ecosystem approach assumes that habitat specialists are co-evolved with processes such as fires assumed to maintain those ecosystems. Data presented here indicate that tallgrass prairie specialist butterflies are not co-evolved with current fire regimes. An alternate perspective views ecological processes as resetting vegetation to current climate and landscape conditions. Over geologic time, relict vegetation associations persist as outliers until an event resets them. In modern times, human disturbances (especially soil-exposing ones) can reset sites to favour the more generalist species (plants and butterflies) found in the prevailing, human-degraded landscape.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f025d43d8783f72dc33a3b85ec0fd72c0827515
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers (2019, background): “Main drivers appear to be habitat modification and moisture levels dependent on climate change (Swengel et al., 2011; Swengel and Swengel, 2015).”