What is it about?
Moths are important part of the ecosystem. We explored the response of two moth families to past forest alteration and recent intensification of landuse within the forest-matrix landscapes. Combining species groups with similar traits would masks their response to habitat alterations.
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Why is it important?
Our approach enabled us to explore and understand how different moth groups and individual species guilds respond to different habitat situations, bringing out the relative importance of different drivers of change to moth assemblages that can be projected to understand other related biodiversity trends in the forest-matrix landscapes. The observed changes in species richness and composition among different forests, ecological types, and moth groups highlight the need to repeatedly monitor biodiversity even within protected and relatively intact forests.
Perspectives
With this work, I am pleased to highlight the importance of insects and particularly moths in the healthy functioning of the forest ecosystems. In Africa where the large ungulates are still found in relatively large numbers, the little things like insects easily get ignored in the conservation planning and management. Nonetheless, they are key to a number of critical ecosystem services, without which we would have a "dead" earth. I hope the approach and findings described in this article stimulates some provocative thoughts about insects in general.
Miss Perpetra Akite
Makerere University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Temporal patterns in Saturnidae (silk moth) and Sphingidae (hawk moth) assemblages in protected forests of central Uganda, Ecology and Evolution, March 2015, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.1477.
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