On the edge: the beetles of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (SAMO) located both within and adjacent to the city of Los Angeles, constitutes an important island of intact habitat for southern California’s rich insect fauna. Though much is known about the vascular plants and vertebrate species occurring in the Santa Monica Mountains, little or no systematic information is available about the invertebrate species. For these reasons, the National Park Service is particularly interested in understanding the numbers and types of invertebrate species, especially insects, that occur throughout the Santa Monica Mountains. Our objective was to compile a list of beetle species from historical literature, collections, and four months of ground and litter sampling at sites throughout SAMO. To date, we have recorded 123 beetle species from insect collections housed at UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, The California Academy of Sciences and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and have documented 107 beetle species recorded in literature. Our field work consisted of 91 collecting events (52 litter samples, 39 general collecting samples) from 56 localities, taken on 11 different dates between February and May 2009. All of these efforts combined returned a total of 653 beetle species occurring in SAMO. Our sampling efforts are by no means complete, but the preliminary results of this study reveal a surprisingly diverse and intact fauna persisting in and on the edge of the most heavily developed area in the Western United States. Conservation and protection of this area is essential to the continued survival of this fauna as well as others.