The race is not to the swift: long-term data reveal pervasive declines in California's low-elevation butterfly fauna

Ecology
Matthew L ForisterArthur M Shapiro

Abstract

Understanding the ecology of extinction is one of the primary challenges facing ecologists in the 21st century. Much of our current understanding of extinction, particularly for invertebrates, comes from studies with large geographic coverage but less temporal resolution, such as comparisons between historical collection records and contemporary surveys for geographic regions or political entities. We present a complementary approach involving a data set that is geographically restricted but temporally intensive: we focus on three sites in the Central Valley of California, and utilize 35 years of biweekly (every two weeks) surveys at our most long-sampled site. Previous analyses of these data revealed declines in richness over recent decades. Here, we take a more detailed approach to investigate the mode of decline for this fauna. We ask if all species are in decline, or only a subset. We also investigate traits commonly found to be predictors of extinction risk in other studies, such as body size, diet breadth, habitat association, and geographic range. We find that population declines are ubiquitous: the majority of species at our three focal sites (but not at a nearby site at higher elevation) are characterized by reductions...Continue Reading

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Citations

Mar 3, 2012·Evolution; International Journal of Organic Evolution·Joshua P JahnerMatthew L Forister
Feb 18, 2014·Conservation Biology : the Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology·Kayce L CasnerArthur M Shapiro
Aug 18, 2016·Biology Letters·Matthew L ForisterArthur M Shapiro
Feb 13, 2015·Biology Letters·Joshua G HarrisonMatthew L Forister
Feb 17, 2019·Global Change Biology·Chris C NiceArthur M Shapiro
Aug 10, 2017·Royal Society Open Science·Nicholas A PardikesMatthew L Forister
Jan 31, 2019·Evolutionary Applications·Joshua P JahnerThomas L Parchman
Oct 15, 2019·Annual Review of Entomology·David L Wagner
Nov 10, 2020·Ecology Letters·James P MichieliniElizabeth E Crone
Jan 13, 2021·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Martin S WarrenSam Ellis
Jul 26, 2017·Science Progress·Dave Goulson, Elizabeth Nicholls

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