Temporal Variations in the Short and Long Term of the Species Richness and the Abundances Structuring in a Same Butterfly Community: An Enlightening Case Study at Gariwang-san (Korea)

The way species-rich communities react over time, in both the short term (inter-annual) and the long term (decades) is usually very complicated but also often proves very instructive as regards several aspects of the functional structuration of the community. A three decades monitoring of the same butterfly community at Gariwang-san (South-Korea) thus provides interesting insights on the temporal responses of several major features of the community structuration. In turn, the close analysis of these responses allows to relevantly address some hotly debated hypothesis. The two following ones are addressed and questioned in particular: (i) which kinds of structural and functional features of communities prove being more or less sensitive to environmental degradations and (ii) to what extent the notions of “functional equivalence” and “community resilience” are likely supported by the analysis derived from this short-term and long-term monitoring.

Besides, on a methodological point of view, it is especially emphasized the absolute necessity, in this type of studies, to consider (sub-) exhaustive samplings of the targeted communities, since incomplete inventories would most often lead to severe bias in the interpretation of results. Alternatively, if (sub-) exhaustive samplings cannot be achieved (as is often the case in practice), it is mandatory to complete the available partial samplings (and the associated incomplete species abundance distributions) by an appropriate procedure of numerical extrapolation.

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