author(s)
J Alfred Daniel, H Sankararaman and Dinesh Rajaram Hegde

abstract
This work was taken with the prime objective to make an inventory of the butterflies of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University so as to generate a baseline data for future studies. A total of 77 taxa of butterflies belonging to 5 families have been recorded in a survey carried out from August 2014 to August 2015 at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University Campus, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. For this study, the campus was mapped into three different habitats viz., Garden land, Botanical Garden and Orchard. Comparison of species similarities between the habitats, revealed 56% similarity between Botanical Garden and Orchard, 46.67% similarity between Botanical Garden and Garden Land and 62% between Garden Land and Orchard. Among the three sites Botanical Garden ranks first with the record of more number of species (73) followed by Orchard (44) and Garden Land (37) being the least. The results of relative diversity (RD) index showed that Nymphalidae (RD value = 37.67) was the dominant family in the area followed by Lycaenidae (22.07%), Pieridae (16.89%) and the least being Hesperiidae and Papilionidae (11.69%).