Analysis and understanding of Lepidoptera community composition in the Colfiorito Plateaus

Lepidoptera may be appropriate as ecological indicators because of their rapid response to environmental changes, along with a sensivity to habitat fragmentation, edge effects, pesticides and their importance as pollinators. They occur in many habitats, reflect changes in other animals and plants and have great resonance with the public. Indeed, they are involved in the achievement of 2010 target and have a primary role in the European policy of environment conservation and management. Although they are much studied some aspects still remain unclear; baseline data on some species habitat preference and activity patterns remain largely unknown, especially for moths. Indeed, lepidoptera communities have been scarcely studied and their ecology of populations is not often well known. Thus, were studied the lepidoptera communities in three types of habitat, different in their degrees of disturbance, in order to assess the composition and the main characteristics; they were lake, marshy and wet meadows vegetation, agricultural crop vegetation and pasture and montane grassland vegetation. Comparisons with habitat types could also reveal important information on species behavioural and ecological plasticity. The main purpose of this research is to develop a monitoring program that is compatible with overall European monitoring needs. It provides standardized protocols, baseline data, and analysis guidance that will be useful for a long-term lepidoptera monitoring program. Additionally, it helps update data of lepidoptera populations of high conservation concern. This study provides the foundation for implementing a long-term lepidoptera monitoring program on Colfiorito open space lands. The relationship between biodiversity and vegetation types were studied with a variety of different indices that can be used as measures of some attribute of community structure. Were used univariate and multivariate methods for discriminating the spatial and temporal variations of species diversity and to compare the effectiveness of various statistical approaches and then present the best strategy for discriminating the spatial variations of species diversity. The first part of investigation has been given to a set of ecological indices that are capable of providing a numerical value using a synthetic overview of species diversity and equipartition based on vegetation types. Shannon-Wiener, Simpson, evenness and Margalef indices were used to visually discriminate the spatial variations. It leaves room for more interpretation the plot obtained from the PCA, constructed on the basis of similarity in species and number of individuals observed in each site. Moreover, the ANOVA allowed to ascertain differences in the number of species in all the indipendent variables and in the number of individuals between type 2 and 3 that are statistically significant at p minus 0.05. The discriminant function analysis played a key role in building a control model based on total number of species and individuals in the sampling sites that were attributed a priori to a category of vegetation. The functions can then be also applied to new cases with measurement for the predictor variables but unknown group membership. Knowning sampling sites values in species and individuals, it is possible to use the discriminant function to determine to which group the sampling sites belongs to. A list of which species occur in each of the habitats and which habitats contain species unique to them is important for conservation planning. A faunal list for Colfiorito plateaus was made and can be ever update with future field data to provide a complete view of when species are on the wing and to document a list of taxa occurring on Colfiorito plateaus.