Congratulations to our third-place winner Ph.D. candidate Sofia Schirmer and Associate Professor Felipe Gawryszewski at Universidade de Brasília for their research on near-infrared reflectance in butterfly wings. This team has been studying butterflies in the Cerrados which is home to 13% of the world’s tropical butterflies. The Cerrados is a highly diverse and threatened savanna that is home to two distinct kinds of vegetation, as you can see in the images below. One of the areas has low levels of tree coverage causing the butterflies to be exposed to large levels of solar radiation. This environment may favor butterflies with higher levels of reflectance not only in the UV and visible ranges but also in the NIR range. Thus far there has been very little research done on the impact of the NIR range and the effect that it may have on the coloration of animals. They predict that the butterflies without canopy coverage will have higher reflectance in the UV, visible, and NIR ranges. The knowledge they gain from this research would allow for a better understanding of the impact of the environment geometry and abiotic factors on animal coloration, as well as, the butterflies’ current and predicted future NIR reflectance.
