A Preliminary Study on the Biodiversity of Insects Collected from A College Campus: Thiruvananthapuram District, Southern Kerala

Insects, the most diverse group of organisms plays a major role in ecosystem function. The present survey was aimed to prepare a checklist of insects found in and around our college campus since there was no known published checklist of insect in Christian college campus till date. Therefore, this is the first study which reports the abundance and distribution of insects in the Christian college campus, Kattakada, Thiruvananthapuram. In this study, a total of 599 individual of insects from 14 orders were collected. Based on the data, Hymenoptera (19.37%) with highest diversity index of H'=0.318 were the most dominant insects in the college campus, followed by Lepidoptera (17.20%), Coleoptera (16.53%) and Hemiptera (9.35%). Compared to other orders, the rarest insect order was Mecoptera with relative abundance, Pi = 0.005. Overall biodiversity indices show relatively high biodiversity in the present campus area.