Earl Chandra, Belitz Michael W, Laffan Shawn W, Barve Vijay, Barve Narayani, Soltis Douglas E, Allen Julie M, Soltis Pamela S, Mishler Brent D, Kawahara Akito Y, Guralnick Robert
Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.
Genetics Institute, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.
iScience. 2021 Mar 23;24(4):102239. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102239. eCollection 2021 Apr 23.
Broad-scale, quantitative assessments of insect biodiversity and the factors shaping it remain particularly poorly explored. Here we undertook a spatial phylogenetic analysis of North American butterflies to test whether climate stability and temperature gradients have shaped their diversity and endemism. We also performed the first quantitative comparisons of spatial phylogenetic patterns between butterflies and flowering plants. We expected concordance between the two groups based on shared historical environmental drivers and presumed strong butterfly-host plant specializations. We instead found that biodiversity patterns in butterflies are strikingly different from flowering plants, especially warm deserts. In particular, butterflies show different patterns of phylogenetic clustering compared with flowering plants, suggesting differences in habitat conservation between the two groups. These results suggest that shared biogeographic histories and trophic associations do not necessarily assure similar diversity outcomes. The work has applied value in conservation planning, documenting warm deserts as a North American butterfly biodiversity hotspot.
对昆虫生物多样性及其形成因素进行广泛的定量评估，目前仍探索得极为不足。在此，我们对北美蝴蝶进行了空间系统发育分析，以检验气候稳定性和温度梯度是否塑造了它们的多样性和特有性。我们还首次对蝴蝶与开花植物的空间系统发育模式进行了定量比较。基于共同的历史环境驱动因素以及假定的蝴蝶与寄主植物之间强烈的专一性，我们预期这两组生物的模式会具有一致性。然而，我们发现蝴蝶的生物多样性模式与开花植物显著不同，尤其是在温暖的沙漠地区。具体而言，与开花植物相比，蝴蝶呈现出不同的系统发育聚类模式，这表明两组生物在栖息地保护方面存在差异。这些结果表明，共同的生物地理历史和营养关联并不一定能确保产生相似的多样性结果。这项研究在保护规划方面具有应用价值，它将温暖的沙漠地区记录为北美蝴蝶生物多样性热点地区。
