RESEARCH ARTICLE


Diversity of Public Health and Forensic Important Flies Using Three Measures of Hill Numbers in Iran



Davoud Keshavarzi1
iD
, Yavar Rassi1, *
iD

1 Department of Medical Entomology and Vector Control, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran


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Creative Commons License
© 2020 Keshavarzi and Rassi

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Medical Entomology and Vector Control, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran E-mail: rassiy@tums.ac.ir


Abstract

Introduction:

Dipteran species (flies) are one of the most important insects within the public health and forensic fields. Previous studies have shown that flies play an important role in transmitting the diseases and also estimating the time of death, but their diversity by new methods has been less studied.

Methods:

Dipteran specimens were collected from rabbit carcasses during spring and summer 2019 and then identified. We used the three measures of Hill numbers (q=0,1,2) to compare the species diversity between the seasons. The analysis was performed with an R package (iNEXT) that provided in 2014.

Results:

During the present study, 12 dipteran species were collected on rabbit carcasses. L. cuprina and M. stabulans were recorded only from the remains of rabbits in summer. The analysis with iNEXT software showed that species richness (q = 0) in spring is lower than summer and this difference was significant. While, the value of Shannon and Simpson diversity index (q = 1, 2) in summer was lower than in spring. Shannon index value was not significantly different between the seasons, as its confidence intervals almost completely overlapped, but a significant difference in Simpson index was detected between the seasons.

Conclusion:

We conclude that Ch. albiceps, L. sericata and C.vicina are more frequent flies in the study area and dipteran species are more diverse in spring. The current study provided a database in the field of public health and forensic entomology that could be useful for estimating minimum postmortem intervals and also in vector control programs.

Keywords: Forensic, Public health, Entomology, Diversity, INEXT, Carrion.