Pollen metabarcoding reveals a broad diversity of plant sources available to farmland flower visitors near tropical montane forest.

Despite the widely recognized role of pollinators in ecosystem services, we currently have a poor understanding of the contribution of Natural Protected Areas neighboring agricultural landscapes to crop pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator interactions. Here, we conducted monthly surveys over a period of one year to study the diversity of insect visitors in dominant fruit crops-avocado, plum, apple, and blackberry-and used pollen DNA metabarcoding to characterize the community of plant sources in and around low-intensive farmland bordered by protected montane forest in Costa Rica. We found that crops and native plants had distinct communities of flower visitors, suggesting the presence of fine-scale habitat differences.

Elevational and seasonal patterns of plant pollinator networks in two highland tropical ecosystems in Costa Rica.

Many plant species in high montane ecosystems rely on animal pollination for sexual reproduction, however, our understanding of plant-pollinator interactions in tropical montane habitats is still limited. We compared species diversity and composition of blooming plants and floral visitors, and the structure of plant-floral visitor networks between the Montane Forest and Paramo ecosystems in Costa Rica. We also studied the influence of seasonality on species composition and interaction structure.

Comprehensive inventory of true flies (Diptera) at a tropical site.

Estimations of tropical insect diversity generally suffer from lack of known groups or faunas against which extrapolations can be made, and have seriously underestimated the diversity of some taxa. Here we report the intensive inventory of a four-hectare tropical cloud forest in Costa Rica for one year, which yielded 4332 species of Diptera, providing the first verifiable basis for diversity of a major group of insects at a single site in the tropics. In total 73 families were present, all of which were studied to the species level, providing potentially complete coverage of all families of the order likely to be present at the site.

Remarkable fly (Diptera) diversity in a patch of Costa Rican cloud forest: Why inventory is a vital science.

Study of all flies (Diptera) collected for one year from a four-hectare (150 x 266 meter) patch of cloud forest at 1,600 meters above sea level at Zurquí de Moravia, San José Province, Costa Rica (hereafter referred to as Zurquí), revealed an astounding 4,332 species. This amounts to more than half the number of named species of flies for all of Central America. Specimens were collected with two Malaise traps running continuously and with a wide array of supplementary collecting methods for three days of each month.

Sampling scarab beetles in tropical forests: the effect of light source and night sampling periods.

Light traps have been used widely to sample insect abundance and diversity, but their performance for sampling scarab beetles in tropical forests based on light source type and sampling hours throughout the night has not been evaluated. The efficiency of mercury-vapour lamps, cool white light and ultraviolet light sources in attracting Dynastinae, Melolonthinae and Rutelinae scarab beetles, and the most adequate period of the night to carry out the sampling was tested in different forest areas of Costa Rica. Our results showed that light source wavelengths and hours of sampling influenced scarab beetle catches.