Extreme south Florida has suffered recent losses of butterfly populations and even species extinctions. Information about the life histories of rare butterflies and their host plants is needed to recover their populations. We assessed urban fragments of pine rockland for their potential to support the federally endangered butterflies Strymon acis bartrami and Anaea troglodyta floridalis. We sampled and mapped the distribution of the larval host plant Croton linearis and used GIS data and fire records to rank each of the ten preserves for suitability to support the rare butterflies. Our findings revealed that host plants are patchily, but widely, distributed and are generally abundant. Croton linearis populations were largest in fragments that had experienced fire within the past decade. In total we estimated that 49,813 C. linearis individuals occurred in nine of the ten preserves we surveyed in 2013. While it is possible that nine of the ten preserves containing C. linearis could support populations of either rare butterfly, our suitability matrix showed that not all preserves are equal, enabling us to make recommendations about where to focus butterfly recovery efforts and how to improve rare habitat at preserves with lower scores.
Natural Areas Journal
Vol. 36 • No. 1
January 2016
Vol. 36 • No. 1
January 2016
butterfly
fire
fragmentation
host plant
pine rockland
