Diversity and Distribution of Lepidopteran Butterflies in Kota District, Rajasthan

Understanding the standing point of biodiversity is an integral part of studying habitat ecology in the arena of the applied ecology and conservation biology. Considering this, a study was conducted to understand the biodiversity of the single species, i.e. Lepidoptera in four different sites of Kota district. Four distinct habitat fragmentation sites, Chambal Garden, Ganesh Udhyan, Industrial Area and agriculture land were selected to understand the diversity and distribution of lepidopteran butterfly. As this group of butterfly is considered as “umbrella taxa”, detailed study of its assemblages could be directly correlated with the changes in microclimates in the selected regions. Therefore, diversity of the Lepidoptera was calculated by Simpson’s index of diversity and Shannon-Weiner Index. Among these four areas, Chambal Garden and Ganesh Udhyan are dominated with the Lepidoptera whereas, decline in abundance could be observed remaining two areas. This study indicated a rich and diverse butterfly habitat in the selected survey area, which could be served a s a future referral for measuring and monitoring biological diversity.


Introduction:
In this present era of climate change, study of biodiversity and its associated consequences is much in demand to combat "crisisorientated" habitat loss.(1) Habitat loss and degradation remain the main causes of biodiversity loss and species extinctions across the world (1) New strategies are required to be implemented for the protection of species in the selected habitat for long-term high conservation interest.(2,3) How precisely spatial and temporal processes can affect the biodiversity patterns is still a big challenge in the contemporary ecology (4).Detailed inventory of the available flora and fauna of the selected sites must be documented in this regards in order to maintain and monitoring the species richness and evenness.Since diversity and/or variability mostly influence the three domains of ecology, i.e., within the species, between the species and between the ecosystems, in-depth study must be carried out in terms of species composition, richness, evenness and interactions (5-9).
Insects, particularly the lepidopteran butterflies are considered as an ecological indicator in in diverse ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, seed dispersal, pollination, predation or parasitism and pest control.(11) We hereby considered the lepidopteran butterflies for our study as it is known as flagship species for the biodiversity study.It is also observed that over the past decades, many reports showed the decrease in population of the Lepidoptera species due to unprecedented environmental hazards like climate change, deforestation, habitat fragmentation and loss, and pesticides and pollution.These negative attributes inevitably showed negative effect on the natural ecosystem.Therefore analyses of the biodiversity of Lepidoptera are essential in terms of seasonal changes and habitat fragmentation in order to conserve the micro-ecosystem.
The objective of this study is to determine the diversity and abundance of the insect fauna, Lepidoptera species at four selected areas of Kota District to maintain and monitoring the conservation ecosystem.

Material and Methods:
Sampling was carried out in the four selected regions of Kota District in Rajasthan, India (25.2138°N, 75.8648°E).S-1: Chambal Garden, S-2: Ganesh Udhyan , S-3: Industrial Area, S-4: Agriculture land Within a group, sampling effort was identical on all plots (standardized by time, number of samples, or number of individuals sampled).
Since very beginning, biodiversity is one of the primary interests of ecologists but quantifying the species diversity of ecological communities is really difficult.During the statistical sampling, two statistical components were for our study, i.e., no of different classes of insects such as species, genera, families, different habitats and distribution of classes among different aspects such as a relative abundance of individuals of different taxa or relative site of habitat that falls into different habitat types.Only lepidopteran species was considered for the present study.Biodiversity of the selected fauna was estimated by Species Richness, Simpson's Indices, Shannon-Weiner Index and Species Evenness.

Species Richness(S)
Species richness is measured by counting of number of species in a community.Apart from species richness other indices are also required to estimate different attributes of populations.
Margalef's Index of Species Richness(S) Margalef's index is a simplest and most useful measure of species diversity.The number of species at a site, in a region or in a collection is called as species richness.

Simpson Index
Species richness which is represented by the number of species and proportion of each species estimates the Simpson Index.This index accounts for the best way for which species is most abundant.
Simpson Index (D) = ∑( ) Simpson's Index (D) conveys the probability that two randomly selected individuals will belong to the common species.

Dominance Index
The pattern of relative abundance of species determines the dominance component of diversity.In this study, the relative dominance of Lepidoptera order in habitat was calculated by the dominance index by using the formula: Relative Dominance = × 100 S-1 (Chambal Garden), S-2 (Ganesh Udhyan), S-3( Industrial Area), S-4( Agriculture Land)

Shannon Weiner Diversity Index
The measure of the likelihood that the next individuals will be the same species as the previous sample is represented by Shannon Weiner diversity index.Two quantifiable measures like species richness and species evenness combine to determine Shannon Weiner index.The diversity value 'H' ranges from 0 to 4 to 7 which indicates low community complexity to high community complexity respectively.So it indicates the measure of order or disorder within a particular system.
The observations indicated a very low value of H-1.33 in Site-3 and a high value of H-2.45 in site S-4 (Table 2).Again diversity was high in the rainy season for butterflies compared to the winter season and summer season as shown in Figure 2. Species richness is the actual number of species in a population.The highest species richness was in site S-4 (S 3.22).The sites S-1 (S = 3.07) and S-4 (S = 2.92) also had nearly equal species richness to site S4.S-3 had the lowest value 2 of S 0.97 as shown in Table 3. Species was greater for these orders in the wet season compared to the dry season (Figure 3).The uniform pattern of distribution of species in an ecological system is represented by Evenness Index.Evenness is considered one when there are similar proportions of all species but when some rare and some common species are found with dissimilarity then the value of evenness increases.
Site-3 and S-2 had the highest and lowest evenness index of 0.96 and 0.68 respectively (Table 4).All the other 2 sites had nearby similar species evenness.This concludes that the species that exist in site-3 were uniformly distributed while species were unevenly distributed in the agro-ecosystem of site-2.

Conclusion:
Present study reveals a good number of lepidopteran population at survey sites of Kota, Rajasthan, even in different seasons.This might be correlated to the fact that Kota region has good amount of light due to longer day periods, and sufficient amount of water resources.This therefore supports their activities and accounts for their successful thriving here.From our study, among the four sites, From the result obtained, the lowest diversity was found in the industrial area while the highest diversity was present in the parks of the Kota district.The high conservation rate was found in the sampling sites; S-1 and S-2 areas.However, extensive care should be taken in the industrial area because of the maximum anthropogenic disturbances and lesser availability of diversified feeding habitats.Our current study might provide an opportunity to estimate the overall species richness of lepidopteran fauna in Kota District; which could be a baseline to gain further nsight into butterfly management and its conservation Total number of species, and N: Total number of individuals of all species] Shannon-Weiner diversity index (H) Shannon-Weiner Index accounts for species richness and proportion of each species within the sampling Site.This index was used for the study of the diversity of species.Shannon-Weiner index is formulated as follows:

[Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Simpson Index (D) of Butterflies of Different Sites of Kota District in different seasons.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Shannon-Weiner Index of Special Richness of butterflies of different seasons

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Margalef's Index of Species Richness of butterflies in different seasons

Table 2 .
Shannon-Weiner Index (D) of Butterflies of Different Sites of Kota District

Table 5 .
Diversity Indices of Butterflies in Different sites of Kota District 4.