How agroforestry and conventional banana plantations affect the diversity and dispersal of butterflies. Banana Plantation Heliconius ethilla

1. Environmental changes, particularly, those related to agriculture, are directly linked to biodiversity loss. The lack of connectivity between remaining habitat patches could impede dispersal and decrease biological diversity. In this way, particular land uses could restrict evolutionary groups, decreasing the genetic and phylogenetic diversity locally, but increasing them regionally. The use of genetic information at the population level, in addition to phylogenetic and species composition data at the community level can help us to understand the effects of agriculture on biological diversity at these different levels.2. We compared the effects of conventional and agroforestry banana plantations on butterflies’ dispersal and biodiversity relative to native forest, using three distinct approaches. At the population level, we analysed ddRAD genomic data from Heliconius ethilla narcae, and, at the community level, both phylogenetic and species composition of Nymphalidae were evaluated. 3. Our results suggest that agroforestry plantations maintain more of the rarest genetic groups from H. ethilla narcaea. Despite evidence for extensive genetic dispersal, these genetic groups were not found within the conventional plantations. The reason for this could be habitat preservation and host plant occurrence in the native and agroforestry plots or synthetic chemical use in the conventional plantation. At the community level, no phylogenetic structure was found, and both banana plantation types shared a similar species diversity, but differed from the native areas.Synthesis and applications: Agroforestry plantations appear to preserve rare genetic information, that could help insects adapt to changing environments, which appeared to be lost under conventional agriculture. Native areas contained distinct biological species composition, likely due to offering particular microhabitats, compared to both types of banana plantation. We did not find any evidence for restricted dispersal between patches, likely due to butterflies being a fairly dispersive taxon.