A few days ago, the Butterfly Conservatory´s reseach team received the approval for publication of our most recent paper named: Butterflies diversity in a tropical rainforest gradient of Arenal, Costa Rica. This article will be published within the next two months by de scientific journal Brenesia of the Department of Natural History of the Costa Rican National Museum.

The objective of the paper was to determine differences in the butterflies community structure in three environments: Pristine zone (rainforest), border or buffer zone and pasture lands.  In the Arenal Area nowdays, is very common to find more and more areas in where deforestation is stoped but with very little or absent effort to recuperate the land, fortunately, once you are there seems like the rainforest intends to get back the land by extending itself. Since this optic it is important to determine if the biodiversity composition is trying to go back to the original or if is suffering some kind of alteration or blocking.

In our paper we used the rarefaction method (A kind of ecological standarization technique)  as well as  eveness and diversity index to explore differences in the biodiversity composition. We found that the buffer zone tends to have a butterfly diversity very similar to the pristine condition but with certain influence of the pasture lands, as a result the biodiversity becomes high in those areas under recuperation.

Best wishes from the Butterfly Conservatory.