Nestedness of habitat specialists within habitat generalists in a butterfly assemblage

1. The habitat requirements of a species are the resources, conditions and space required for survival and reproduction. The habitat requirements of butterflies have been well studied, but the extent to which individuals within a species and between species utilise and share the habitat is poorly known. 2. In a butterfly assemblage in northern Italy, we found that adults from 30 species avoid deciduous high-density forests and their ecotones, and they were positively related to open areas and their ecotones. Besides these common features, five groups of species can be discriminated in relation to a gradient from open area to forest, and species within groups were not equally specialised, as observed from a bipartite network analysis. In particular, some species appeared to be specialised and others appeared to be generalist, suggesting a nested pattern of resource use, rather than a clustered pattern in which each species uses a different subset of habitat types. 3. The degree of variation in specialisation among species varied with the number of species falling in each group. Thus, an increased number of species, and thus possibly competition, is more likely to promote the co-occurrence of generalist and specialised species (nested patterns) rather than an increased niche segregation among species. 4. Ascertaining how species overlap their habitat use at a local scale can be relevant for conservation purposes, because specialised populations are potentially more susceptible to network distortions.