PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #24: Conservation and Biodiversity: Birds and arthropods.
Presiding: C. Bock
Monday, August 5. 1:00 PM to 3:45 PM. Mesquite Room, Radisson.

Temporal diversity of frugivorous butterflies in Ghana's sacred forest .

Bossart, Janice^*,1, Opuni-Frimpong, Emmanuel², ¹ The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ² Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, Kumasi, Ghana

ABSTRACT- The Upper Guinean rainforests of Ghana are globally recognized as both imminently imperiled and critically understudied. Thus, species inventories from this global biodiversity hotspot are especially urgent. We are conducting standardized surveys of isolated indigenous sacred groves and forest reserves of Ghana to map spatial and temporal distributions of frugivorous butterfly diversity. Sacred groves are ancient irreplaceable relics of climax forest and potential refugia for forest dwelling species. These indigenous conservation sites present a unique opportunity to explore, in situ, impacts of long-term protection and subsequent complete isolation on forest dwelling species and communities. Inventory efforts to date have resulted in nearly 3000 captures from four sacred groves and two forest reserves, representing over 50% of the genera known to frequent fruit-baited traps and slightly less than 50% of fruit-feeding species. These inventory data include new distributional records, newly described species, and multiple rare species. Temporal and spatial heterogeneity is evidenced as differences in species richness, composition, and evenness.

KEY WORDS: Afrotropics, Lepidoptera, fragmentation, complementarity