Arthropod Diversity Associated with Botanical Garden and Nursery Habitats at a University Campus in Southern Punjab, Pakistan

Abstract

Managed green spaces like botanical gardens and plant nurseries can serve as valuable sources of arthropod diversity within the otherwise arid, built up and developed institutional landscape; however, such spaces are under-represented in the botanical garden survey of southern Punjab, Pakistan. The present study is a baseline field survey of arthropod fauna associated with botanical garden and nursery plantations of Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan (RYK) Campus for a period of 6 weeks (late March to early June 2026) with three-day sampling interval of each week. Forty-three confirmed families, genera and species (arthropod taxa) representing two classes, 12 orders and 29 families were recorded, including an estimated 3,239 individuals reconstructed from the numbers recorded in the field based on ranges. The numerically dominant classes were Hymenoptera (33.3% of total estimated abundance) and Diptera (26.8%) followed by Orthoptera (11.1%) and Araneae (8.6%). Shannon–Wiener diversity (H′ = 3.28), Simpson's diversity (1−D = 0.94) and Pielou's evenness (J′ = 0.87) showed a moderately-to-highly diverse and fairly even distribution of the community. One other taxon, Coccinella sp. was noted provisionally, waiting for pictures to confirm against C. septempunctata and is reported separately. Key pollinators (Apis mellifera, Cataglyphis setipes), pollinators and public-health relevant synanthropic species (Musca domestica, Culex quinquefasciatus, Aedes aegypti), and natural predators (Mantis religiosa, Lycosa terrestris, Pholcus phalangioides) were the dominant taxa. The useful results of this work will help inform the importance of the conservation of arthropods in vegetated institutional landscapes in arid agro-ecological zones, and will help to provide a baseline for this campus that is quantitative. We emphasize that abundance is an estimate (midpoints of field-observed abundance ranges) and not a total count based on traps, and some identifications were restricted to genus or family level; both are discussed along with proposed suggestions for longer-term, trap-standardized monitoring.