Abstract
Changes in butterfly phenology due to climate changes have led to the need for models based on factors other than calendar date to predict butterfly development, allowing those monitoring their populations to increase the effectiveness of field surveys. In this study, we developed two simple climatic models, one using yearly accumulated growing degree days (GDD) and the other using yearly accumulated shortwave radiation flux densities (SRAD), to determine if these variables can predict first emergence of three butterfly species with less error than an approach based on the average ordinal date of first observation at a site. Furthermore, we investigated whether combining our two models would increase our ability to predict the timing of first emergence. We determined that GDD models were better at predicting first emergence than were ordinal date models and SRAD models for all species tested; however, the actual variation among these models was so small that any additional effort required to develop GDD models would not justify their use as a replacement for the simpler ordinal date models at this time, although as climate changes they may become more useful. We also determined that combined models did not improve the ability to predict first emergence.
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Acknowledgements
Support for this work was provided by the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University. We thank Jerry Weidmann from the Ohio Lepidopterists for sharing their butterfly survey data with us and Benjamin Buzzee from the Iowa State University Statistics Department for access to and guidance for the application we used to retrieve climate data from Daymet. We also thank Julia Schwager, Sarah Rueger, and Samuel Waite for laboratory assistance. We appreciate additional advice and information provided by Nathan Brockman and Aaron Steil. Finally, we thank Dr. Mary A. Harris, Iowa State University, for her thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, and two anonymous reviewers for their additional suggestions. This paper is a product of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project Numbers IOW03617 and IOW05561 are supported by USDA/NIFA and State of Iowa funds. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Lang, B.J., Widrlechner, M.P., Dixon, P.M. et al. Can climatic variables improve phenological predictions for butterfly species?. J Insect Conserv 24, 375–383 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-019-00212-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-019-00212-3