The understanding of the distribution and richness patterns of species is very important in ecology. Also, for the Cerrado region, this is very important and urgent, because of the strong pressure for new areas designated for agriculture. In five areas of the Cerrado, an exploratory study was carried out on the diversity, evenness and similarity of moth species. Moths were captured in a white sheet hung vertically and illuminated by a 250 Watt mercury vapor lamp. The alpha diversity was calculated using the Shannon-Wiener index (H') and the Simpson index (γ). The beta diversity was examined for all sampled localities and estimated by Wittaker's measure. The Sörensen and Jaccard indexes were used to calculate similarity. A total of 11130 individuals, 1064 species and 33 families were collected during the study. Great differences were found in the diversity (H'), and according to this index, the minimum value found was 1.60 and highest value was 4.59. From the Simpson index (γ), the minimum value was 0.42 and highest 0.96. With both methods, in all the localities, these values were significantly different by the T test (p<0.001). The mean beta diversity found was 0.6929, and the minimum and highest values found were respectively 0.4328 and 0.8615. A positive correlation was found between beta diversity and distances among the localities (r²=0.5844, p<0.05). Faunal similarities among sites were low, and the highest value found was 0.4146 by Sörensen index and 0.2615 by Jaccard index.
Lepidoptera; moths; Brazilian savannas; biodiversity; similarity