CHAPTER 3.

1 LOCAL SPECIES DIVERSITY

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Long-term temporal changes of biological communities are not an unusual phenomenon, but are mostly well-documented only for plants and vertebrate taxa from temperate regions or for taxa with special relevance, such as game or pest species (see e.g. Rosenzweig 1995, Maurer 1999, Lawton 2000 for manifold examples & references). Population fluctuations of species can be regular or synchronized by an outside factor (see Selas et al. 2004, Bjrnstad et al. 1998 for examples on moths), or they can be irregular, temporally autocorrelated (red noise) or completely random (white noise; Lawton 2000, Akakaya et al. 2003). Obviously, even with huge amounts of data it is very difficult to separate the latter from the former (Lawton 2000). Leaving aside the possibility of an artefact result due to multicollinearity of predictor variables (McNally 2000, see above for discussion), two potentially influential factors on temporal changes of hawkmoths assemblages in Borneo come to mind: Deviations from the otherwise very stable and uniform climate during the irregular el-nio southern oscillations (e.g. Kitayama et al. 1999), a weather phenomenon that leads to several months of draught every few years and that has potentially far-reaching biological impacts (on trees: Slik 2004, Wich & van Schaik 2000, on butterflies: Cleary & Mooers 2004, Itioka & Yamauti 2004, but see Hill et al. 2003). Furthermore, a rapid large-scale habitat conversion has changed Borneo (as well as many other tropical rainforests, Bowles et al. 1998, Sodhi et al. 2004), which until the beginning of industrial logging in the 1950s (Marsh et al. 1996) was mostly covered with relatively undisturbed forest. El-nio years since 1970 were identified in 1973, 1978, 1983, 1987, 1991-95, 1997-98 and 2002 (source: http://www.elnino.noaa.govT). Thus, el-nio climate changes occurred in all of the analysed sampling periods (in 5-year steps) and cannot be associated with the observed Sphingid community changes at this temporal resolution. However, the strongest el-nio events were identified in 1983 and 1998, which matches the highest values on dimension 1 of the MDS (figure 3.5) in the corresponding half-decades. Therefore, the idea that Sphingidae assemblages are influenced by this global climate phenomenon cannot be ruled out either. Temporal changes of the community are mostly projected on dimension 1 of the MDS-plot, but to a lesser degree also on dimension 2, the disturbance axis (see figure 3.5). However, values seem to decrease rather than increase with time, thus developing towards primary habitat a counterintuitive result that might be explained by better accessibility of jungle regions in modern times, which allows easier sampling in primary habitats or by an increased interest in the ecology of primary habitats. In conclusion, no proof for an influence of the large-scale habitat conversion on Borneo on local samples of hawkmoths over the course of the least 30 years could be found in the data.

Species turnover, anthropogenic habitat homogenization, and estimates of regional richness One of the suspected threats of anthropogenic habitat conversion in tropical regions is habitat homogenization (McKinney & Lockwood 1999, see also Collins et al. 2002 for recent discussion), the conversion of rainforest sites with high between-habitat diversity into homogenous cultivated areas. It is expected that disturbed sites are to a larger proportion populated by opportunistic species which are adapted to reach such regions quickly (e.g. Kitahara & Fujii 1994, see also discussion of differences between subfamily-responses to