Beauty Bishop Butterflies

Biodiversity is one of the important cornerstone of sustainable development and represents the biological wealth of a given nation. The world is currently facing its greatest ever biodiversity crisis. Insects and plants are becoming extinct because of habitat loss, over-exploitation, pollution, over-population and the threat of global climatic changes. Understanding insect species abundance and distribution is a major goal of insect ecology. Butterflies (Order: Lepidoptera, Class: Insecta) offer good opportunities for studies on population and community ecology. Many species of this beautiful group are strictly seasonal, preferring only a particular set of habitats. Being good indicators of climatic conditions as well as seasonal and ecological changes, butterflies are now being included in biodiversity studies and biodiversity conservation prioritization programmes. This book deals with the study on butterflies in six different habitats in Bishop Heber College campus, Trichy District, Tamil Nadu started with species identification, classification and scientific documentation, their habitat preferences, distribution, seasonality and molecular phylogeny (Lepidoptera: rhopalocer).