Decreasing species richness and positive Rapoport effects of Crambidae (Lepidoptera) on Mount Taibai

The vertical gradient pattern of species richness has been studied intensively over the past decades. Among these, Rapoport's rule is one of the important hypotheses of the patterns of species richness and macroecology, asserting the latitude or altitude distributional width of animal and plant species gradually narrows from a high latitude or high altitude area to low latitude or low altitude areas. However, altitudinal distributions and Rapoport’s rule have rarely been tested for Asian Lepidopterans. Pyraustinae and Spilomelinae (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) are widely distributed across the world's major geographic realms and some species pose serious economic problems. These crambids as model organisms are extremely diverse in temperate Asia including in Mount Taibai where is considered as an ideal area for studying the vertical distribution patterns of insect species and verifying the universality of Rapoport's rule from the perspective of spatial scale. Based on the investigation of al..., Based on the investigation of altitudinal distribution data with identification by using both DNA barcoding and traditional classification of Pyraustinae and Spilomelinae, we adopted four commonly used methods to test for the impact of Rapoport effect on species range size, including the Stevens' method (Stevens, 1989), Pagel’s method (Pagel et al., 1991), Rohde's method (Rohde et al., 1993), and across-species method (Letcher & Harvey, 1994)., ,