Taxonomic and functional homogenization of butterfly communities along an urban gradient
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urbanization is a major cause of global insect declines, yet some species can persist, and even thrive, in cities. Research on butterflies frequently report reduced diversity in urban habitats compared to rural ones, but less is known about whether urbanization favours butterflies with specific functional traits. Further, few studies have evaluated whether urbanization leads to the biotic homogenization of butterfly communities, despite being frequently reported for other taxa. Here, we investigate how butterfly community composition changes along an urban gradient by surveying 44 sites around Montréal, Quebec, Canada. We test the hypothesis that urban butterfly communities are homogenized at the taxonomic and functional levels. We found clear differences in the structure of urban versus rural butterfly communities with urban areas favouring a few, highly abundant, non‐native species. These shifts were defined by losses of native species richness and abundance combined with increases in non‐native species abundance. For most of the butterfly community, species with longer flight periods were more common in urban areas. Finally, urban communities were homogenized at the taxonomic and functional levels as demonstrated by reductions in beta diversity and variation in several key functional traits (wingspan, larval diet breadth, oviposition style) in urban habitats compared to rural ones. Overall, urban habitats in this region support less diverse butterfly communities that are homogenized. Since urban areas are growing worldwide, a better understanding of how biotic homogenization arises and what its consequences are will be key to guiding future conservation efforts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".