Tropical dry forests are an essential habitat for many endemic and threatened insects. Mexico has one of the best examples of this habitat in the neotropics which is severely under threat. Despite the ecological importance of insects, they are very rarely taken into account in conser-vation programs. Tropical leaf-mining insects are species diverse and easily sampled at larval stage within their leaf mines and immature stages can be identified using DNA barcoding. This makes leafminers ideal for understanding how plant-insect interactions vary along forest disturbance gradients and subsequent successional stages. Our aim is to explore and describe the diversity of leaf-mining insects and their interactions with their host plants and their responses to anthropogenic and natural disturbances in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve and Huatulco National Park. We collected tenanted leaf mines along several disturbance and succession gradients. Immature stages were dissected out of the leaf mines and DNA barcoded. In addition, we analysed metabarcoding data from Malaise trap samples and pooled out any sequences belonging to insect genera with leaf-mining species. We found 509 OTU in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve and 472 OTU in Huatulco National Park. Preliminary results suggest that species richness and abundance is higher in sites with an early forest succession in comparition with last forest succession. We found differences according to species composition related to successional stages. These differences were significant for sites in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve. Our results show relation between leaf-mining insects in tropical dry forests and their possible importance in succession pathways.