Preliminary Studies on Butterfly Fauna of Chail Wildlife Sanctuary, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh

Biodiversity is one of the important aspects of sustainable development and represents biological wealth of a nation but the world is facing its greatest ever biodiversity crisis and diversity in the living world is staggering, therefore it needs to be conserved and it would have been impossible to deal with enormous diversity if such a significant data is not timely classified and documented. In this envision, a one year study was carried out in Chail Wildlife Sanctuary of Himachal Pradesh during the March 2017 to Feb 2018. The study aims to make a checklist of butterflies so as to find the threatened taxa and make a preliminary note on their conservation strategy. Present study revealed that a total of 53 species of butterflies belonging to five families i. e. Nymphalidae, Papilionidae, Pieridae, Lycanidae and Hesperidae were found. The family Nymphalidae was most dominant with 23 species followed by 12 species of family Pieridae, 11 species of the family Lycanidae, 4 species of the family Papilionidae and 3 species of the family Hesperidae. Percentage composition showed that the family Nymphalidae constituted about 43 % of total butterfly fauna followed by Pieridae (23 %), Lycanidae (21 %), Papilionidae (8 %) and of the family Hesperidae (5 %). Species diversity was found highest in the family Lycanidae (2.31) and lowest in the family Pieridae (0.78), evenness was highest in the family Nymphalidae (7.77) and lowest in the family Hesperidae (1.22). Similarly species richness was highest in the family Papilionidae (0.93) and lowest in the family Nymphalidae (0.39). The study of butterfly fauna and their characters provide crucial information on the ecology of an area, they act as good bioindicators, play a major role in pollination of different flowering plants thus is an important group of ecology and conservation and can forecast the conservation status of any given area. So the studies on monitoring the species diversity and their abundance provide crucial information on their population dynamics and a detailed study of butterfly diversity in these areas is in progress.