Butterfly Diversity and Community Dynamics among Three Gardens in an Urban Zoo.

Urbanization has reshaped landscapes worldwide and is known to strongly impact biodiversity. Butterflies are useful ecological indicators of urbanization because of their short lifespans, diverse habitat requirements, and sensitivity to temperature and microclimates.Butterfly gardens provide habitat patches within urbanized landscapes by including both larval hostplants and adult nectar plants, and thus are regularly recommended as a conservation action. To evaluate the effectiveness of butterfly gardens as urban conservation tools, it is essential to understand the dynamics of butterfly colonization and community change over time. To better understand how butterfly communities respond to different stages of urban gardens we examined three complementary datasets from gardens at the Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden. Butterflies were detected immediately post garden planting but after 28 survey weeks community diversity differed with landscape context: the garden adjacent to a woody-shrub habitat accumulated more species and individuals than the garden embedded in an impervious surface matrix. Species richness was similar among gardens, but butterfly community compositions remained distinct, with some overlap observed in newly established gardens during the first summer post-planting. Finally, butterfly communities were distinctly separate by time period with beta diversity driven primarily by species turnover rather than species nestedness. Together these complementary results highlight that butterfly gardens can make meaningful conservation contributions, but their success is strongly dependent on both context and time. Further studies are needed to determine how plant selection, weather variability, seasonal timing, and position within the surrounding landscape matrix influence colonization trajectories and long-term butterfly community dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]