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E-book Atlas of Butterflies and Diurnal Moths in the Monsoon Tropics of Northern Australia
In this book, we have attempted to break new ground. Our study is unique in several respects: not only does it produce a set of maps for a remote and poorly known area of Australia, but also the distributional point data of each species are integrated and compared with the spatial distribution of their larval food plants. The geographic range of each species is then estimated using Geographical Information System (GIS) software. Using a novel approach, the geographic range is inferred using a set of explicit criteria that integrate the spatial records of each butterfly and diurnal moth with those of their larval food plants (based on online data in Australia’s Virtual Herbarium and the Atlas of Living Australia). In addition, the book includes images of living butterflies, graphs of seasonal changes in relative abundance and phenology charts of the immature stages for each species—information that has been lacking in previous Australian butterfly atlases.There is currently increasing pressure for the exploitation of northern Australia’s natural resources, particularly expansion of the pastoral, agricultural/horticultural and mining industries, which will inevitably result in substantial habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation and loss of biodiversity (Garnettet al. 2010). In addition, there are a multitude of other threats to the region’s biodiversity, including invasive species (e.g. weeds, feral animals, tramp ants), inappropriate fire regimes, intensification of pastoralism (impacts of cattle grazing) (Garnettet al. 2010) and, of course, climate change, particularly increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and its effect on vegetational change (Parret al. 2014). Hence, there is an urgent need to identify the region’s biological assets, to inform policy and management agencies in their decision-making processes and to set priorities for biodiversity conservation. While a broad-scale inventory of the terrestrial vertebrates of northern Australia has been undertaken in relation to the extent of their representativeness in the conservation reserve system (Woinarski 1992), there has been little synthesis of the region’s invertebrates. Such baseline data on the composition, distribution and abundance of this key component of biodiversity are critical because they allow us to identify areas of high conservation value, as well as determine the extent and direction of change in future. This atlas aims to collate and disseminate baseline information for one key group of invertebrates: the butterflies and diurnal moths of the insect order Lepidoptera.
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