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Accounting for habitat when considering climate: has the niche of the Adonis blue butterfly changed in the UK?

  • Conservation ecology - Original research
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Abstract

The dramatic recovery of three species of grassland specialist butterfly threatened with extinction at their high latitude range limits in the 1980s has been attributed to two factors: increased grazing on calcareous grassland sites and warmer air temperatures. Both result in the warming of soil surface temperatures, favourable to the larvae of these species. We address the influence of both of these factors on the habitat usage of the butterfly Polyommatus bellargus, undergoing recovery at its northern range edge. We test the hypothesis that the larval niche of P. bellargus has become less constrained in the past three decades, whilst controlling for changes in habitat structure. Once habitat change has been accounted for we find no evidence for a broadening of the larval niche of P. bellargus. Further, we show that coincident with the recovery of P. bellargus there have been drastic reductions in average turf height across UK chalk grasslands, but changes in air temperature have been highly variable. We conclude that changes to soil surface temperatures caused by reducing turf heights will have been a more consistent influence than air temperature increases, and so habitat improvements through increased grazing will have been the major driver of recovery in P. bellargus. We consider the need to account for changes in habitat when exploring the impacts of recent climate change on local habitats in thermophilous species, and emphasise the continued importance of habitat management to support such species under variable local climates.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the CEH Integrating Fund project, C03480. We would like to thank the Lulworth estate, Dorset Wildlife Trust and Wessex Water for access to Five Marys Tumuli, Fontmell Down and Ballard Down, respectively. Thanks to H. Hesketh for advice and support throughout this work, M. McCracken, D. Simcox, M. Pfaff, H. Wlikinson, E. Turner and R. Walker-Brown for help with fieldwork, D. Roy for use of oviposition data, N. Golding for code and help in implementing expectation maximisation models and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Maclean Building, Benson Lane, Crowmarsh Gifford, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, OX10 8BB, UK

    Rory S. O’Connor & Rosemary S. Hails

  2. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, The Tinbergen Building, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PS, UK

    Rory S. O’Connor & Jeremy A. Thomas

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  1. Rory S. O’Connor
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  2. Rosemary S. Hails
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  3. Jeremy A. Thomas
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Correspondence to Rory S. O’Connor.

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Communicated by Klaus Fischer.

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O’Connor, R.S., Hails, R.S. & Thomas, J.A. Accounting for habitat when considering climate: has the niche of the Adonis blue butterfly changed in the UK?. Oecologia 174, 1463–1472 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-013-2850-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-013-2850-1

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