Moth species richness in an upland tropical rainforest: A citizen scientist assisted study

Abstract

Diversity studies on moths in Australia are rare, presenting various shortfalls in knowledge that impedes and understanding of their biodiversity values and their conservation. In particular, the Wet Tropics of Australia deserves attention, given the paucity of systematic moth surveys in the region and its World Heritage Area status. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a study to observe moths on 191 nights over a main one-year survey period at an upland rainforest locality, and uploaded all observations on iNaturalist. We also compiled other incidental observations in the general locality by other observers and observations outside the survey period. In total, we document 4,434 observations of moths represented by 1041 distinct moth morphospecies. Of these, 703 are formally named species of moths, 146 to genus and 255 to higher taxonomic designations above genus level. Despite the rather intensive main survey effort, our results suggest that we have yet to reach a plateau in documenting the moth species richness of the locality. Using this study as a model, we show that the iNaturalist platform serves as an effective means to document and digitally curate biodiversity values at a locality, whilst providing complete data transparency and enabling broader community engagement of citizen scientists. We recommend the use of iNaturalist for future moth inventories, and as a resource for follow up meta-analyses of regional moth diversity and distributions.