Tropical ecosystems are often considered as highly stable environments with negligible seasonality. The opposite is true and many tropical biomes, including lowland rainforests, are strongly seasonal in both environmental conditions and dynamics of communities. This is evidenced also by our newest paper published in the Ecology and Evolution journal just two days ago. Based on our very intensive sampling of butterflies and moths in rainforests of the lower elevations of Mount Cameroon, we are showing the dynamics of their communities in relation to the local seasonal changes of dry and rainy periods. Although we are not covering the high wet season (the monthly precipitation exceeds 2 metres during that period), there is a strong seasonal turnover of community composition. Simultaneously, we are showing the dynamics of species richness: in most groups, species richness drops during rains and then rises towards the high dry season. Subsequently, diversity of some groups continues to increase towards the rain season beginning, whilst others reach their richness peak in the high dry season. Congratulations to Vincent’s first first-authored “big ecological paper”! Now, he is analysing how this seasonal dynamics influence elevational diversity patterns.
Euphaedra permixtum, a common fruit-feeding butterfly in the foothills of Mount Cameroon. © Jan Mertens
Full citation: Maicher V., Sáfián S., Murkwe M., Przybyłowicz Ł., Janeček Š., Fokam E.B., Pyrcz, T. & Tropek R. (2018) Flying between raindrops: Strong seasonal turnover of several Lepidoptera groups in lowland rainforests of Mount Cameroon. Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.