Preliminary Study on the Distribution and Diversity of Diptera at Tuba Island Reserve Forest, Langkawi Malaysia

Insects, the ecologically important organisms, contribute most to the world’s biodiversity. A study on distribution to diversity of order Diptera was conducted in a selected area of Tuba Island Forest Reserve, Langkawi from 17th September to 21st September 2020 using Malaise traps. Three study sites which were forest fringe, middle forest and inner forest were chosen. A total of 5450 individuals of Diptera belonging to 18 families and 27 morphospecies were collected in this study. Diptera samples were highly abundant in the forest fringe with Mycetophilidae as the most abundant family recorded, while the least abundant family was Drosophilidae. The Shannon-Weiner Diversity Index (H’) showed that the forest fringe had the highest diversity value (H’=2.05), followed by the inner forest (H’=0.67) and middle forest (H’=0.45). The highest Evenness Index (E’) value was recorded from the inner forest with E’=0.66 while the highest value for Margalef Richness Index (R’) was from the forest fringe which was 1.91. The Kruskal-Wallis H test conducted indicates that there was a significant difference in the distribution of Dipteran across the three locations of the forest with P