Abstract: To establish the Beauveria resources in the Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve for the development of pests biocontrol agents, from November 2016 to January 2018, we systematically collected the Beauveria resources in the four tropical forests in the Reserve at 60 sampling spots. Morphological and molecular sequencing techniques were used to identify the species. The species diversity, habitat and altitude distribution were analyzed using species abundance, Shannon-Wiener index H and Pielou evenness index. A total of 207 infected pests were collected, from which 5 Beauveria species, including B. bassiana, B. brongniartii, B. amorpha, B. loeiensis,and B. feline were identified. B. bassiana was the dominant species of relative abundance 91.3%, followed by B. brongniartii of relative abundance 6.3%, B. loeiensis of relative abundance 1.44%, and B. amorpha and B. felina of relative abundance 0.48%. In view of habitat distribution, the Beauveria species distributed more in the tropical limestone monsoon forest and tropical monsoon evergreen broad-leaf forest than in tropical bamboo and protected monsoon areas. Along altitude, Beauveria species and strains distributed more at low altitude areas than at high-altitude and mid-altitude areas. The Shannon-Wiener index were higher in low altitude areas than in high-altitude and mid-altitude areas, and the evenness index ranked from high to low were low-altitude, high-altitude and mid-altitude.

Key words: Beauveria, entomogenous fungi, biodiversity, Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve, biological control