Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:58:45.720Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Canopy Cover Shapes Bat Diversity across an Urban and Agricultural Landscape Mosaic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Amanda M Bailey ,
Holly K Ober Open the ORCID record for Holly K Ober [Opens in a new window] ,
Brian E Reichert  and
Robert A McCleery Open the ORCID record for Robert A McCleery [Opens in a new window]
Amanda M Bailey
Affiliation:
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0430, USA
Holly K Ober
Affiliation:
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, North Florida Research & Education Center, University of Florida, Quincy, FL 32351-5677, USA
Brian E Reichert
Affiliation:
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0430, USA
Robert A McCleery*
Affiliation:
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0430, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Robert A McCleery, Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Human alteration of the planet’s terrestrial landscapes for agriculture, habitation and commerce is reshaping wildlife communities. The threat of land cover change to wildlife is pronounced in regions with rapidly growing human populations. We investigated how species richness and species-specific occurrence of bats changed as a function of land cover and canopy (tree) cover across a rapidly changing region of Florida, USA. Contrary to our predictions, we found negligible effects of agriculture and urban development on the occurrence of all species. In contrast, we found that a remotely sensed metric of canopy cover on a broad scale (25 km2) was a good predictor of the occurrence of eight out of ten species. The occurrence of all smaller bats (vespertilionids) in our study increased with 0–50% increases in canopy cover, while larger bats showed different patterns. Occurrence of Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) decreased with increasing canopy cover, and Florida bonneted bats (Eumops floridanus) were not influenced by canopy cover. We conclude that remotely sensed measures of canopy cover can provide a more reliable predictor of bat species richness than land-cover types, and efforts to prevent the loss of bat diversity should consider maintaining canopy cover across mosaic landscapes with diverse land-cover types.

Keywords

Floridaland cover changemultiple species occupancyacoustic surveyspecies richness
Type
Research Paper
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 46 , Issue 3: Thematic Section: Bringing Species and Ecosystems Together with Remote Sensing Tools to Develop New Biodiversity Metrics and Indicators , September 2019 , pp. 193 - 200
Copyright
© Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

The online version of this article has been updated since original publication. A notice detailing the changes has also been published at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892921000023

References

Agranat, I (2014) Detecting bats with ultrasonic microphones: understanding the effects of microphone variance and placement on detection rates [www document]. URL www.wildlifeacoustics.com/images/pdfs/UltrasonicMicrophones.pdfGoogle Scholar
Avila-Flores, R, Fenton, MB (2005) Use of spatial features by foraging insectivorous bats in a large urban landscape. Journal of Mammalogy 86: 1193–1204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, AM, Ober, HK, Sovie, AR, McCleery, RA (2017) Impact of land use and climate on the distribution of the endangered Florida bonneted bat. Journal of Mammalogy 98: 1586–1593.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barclay, RMR, Kurta, A (2007) Ecology and behavior of bats roosting in tree cavities and under bark. In: Bats in Forests: Conservation and Management, eds Lacki, MJ, Hayes, JP, Kurta, A, pp. 17–59. Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Best, TL, Geluso, KN (2003) Summer foraging range of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis Mexicana) from Carlsbad Cavern, New Mexico. Southwestern Naturalist 48: 590–596.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, TL, Kiser, WM, Rainey, JC (1997) Eumops glaucinus. Mammalian Species 551: 1–6.Google Scholar
Brigham, RM (2007) Bats in forests: what we know and what we need to learn. In: Bats in Forests: Conservation and Management, eds Lacki, MJ, Hayes, JP, Kurta, A, pp. 1–15. Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Britzke, ER, Murray, KL, Heywood, JS, Robbins, LW (2002) Acoustic identification. In: The Indiana bat: Biology and Management of an Endangered Species, eds Kurta, A, Kennedy, J, pp. 221–225. Austin, TX, USA: Bat Conservation International.Google Scholar
Carter, TC, Menzel, JM (2007) Behavior and day-roosting ecology of North American foliage-roosting bats. In: Bats in Forests: Conservation and Management, eds Lacki, MJ, Hayes, JP, Kurta, A, pp 61–81. Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, JL, Barclay, RM (2011) Influence of urbanization on demography of little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) in the prairies of North America. PLoS One 6: e20483.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Darracq, AK, Boone, WW IV, McCleery, RA (2016) Burn regime matters: a review of the effects of prescribed fire on vertebrates in the longleaf pine ecosystem. Forest Ecology and Management 378: 214–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, MD (2012) Relationship between land cover and insectivorous bat activity in an urban landscape. Urban Ecosystems 15: 683–695.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duchamp, JE, Arnett, EB, Larson, MA, Swihart, RK (2007) Ecological considerations for landscape-level management of bats. In: Bats in Forests: Conservation and Management, eds Lacki, MJ, Hayes, JP, Kurta, A., pp. 237–261. Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, EC, Ramankutty, N (2008) Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 439–447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elmore, LW, Miller, DA, Vilella, FJ (2005) Foraging area size and habitat use by red bats (Lasiurus borealis) in an intensively managed pine landscape in Mississippi. American Midland Naturalist 154: 405–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (2012) Florida’s Wildlife Legacy Initiative: Florida’s State Wildlife Action Plan. Tallahassee, FL: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission [www document]. URL https://myfwc.com/conservation/special-initiatives/fwli/action-planGoogle Scholar
Froidevaux, JS, Zellweger, F, Bollmann, K, Jones, G, Obrist, MK (2016) From field surveys to LiDAR: shining a light on how bats respond to forest structure. Remote Sensing of Environment 175: 242–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaisler, J, Zukal, J, Rehak, Z, Homolka, M (1998) Habitat preference and flight activity of bats in a city. Journal of Zoology 244: 439–445.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gehrt, SD, Chelsvig, JE (2003) Bat activity in an urban landscape: patterns at the landscape and microhabitat scale. Ecological Applications 13: 939–950.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gehrt, SD, Chelsvig, JE (2004) Species-specific patterns of bat activity in an urban landscape. Ecological Applications 14: 624–635.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimm, NB, Feath, SH, Golubiewski, NE, Redman, CL, Wu, J, Bai, X, Briggs, JM (2008) Global change and the ecology of cities. Science 319: 756–760.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hancock, S, Armston, J, Hofton, M, Sun, X, Tang, H, Duncanson, LI, Kellner, J, Dubayah, R (2019) The GEDI simulator: a large‐footprint waveform Lidar simulator for calibration and validation of spaceborne missions. Earth and Space Science 6: 294–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hansen, AJ, Neilson, RP, Dale, VH, Flather, CH, Iverson, LR, Currie, DJ, Shafer, S, Cook, R, Bartlein, PJ (2001) Global change in forests: responses of species, communities, and biomes: interactions between climate change and land use are projected to cause large shifts in biodiversity. BioScience 51: 765–779.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, V, Selman, P (2002) Landscape scale planning: exploring alternative land use scenarios. Landscape and Urban Planning 60: 211–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Homer, CG, Dewitz, JA, Yang, L, Jin, S, Danielson, P, Xian, G, Coulston, J, Herold, ND, Wickham, JD, Megown, K (2015) Completion of the 2011 National Land Cover Database for the conterminous United States – representing a decade of land cover change information. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 81: 345–354.Google Scholar
Humphrey, SR (1975) Nursery roosts and community diversity of Nearctic bats. Journal of Mammalogy 56: 321–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jetz, W, Wilcove, DS, Dobson, AP (2007) Projected impacts of climate and land-use change on the global diversity of birds. PLoS Biology 5: e157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, G, Jacobs, DS, Kunz, TH, Willig, MR, Racey, PA (2009) Carpe noctem: the importance of bats as bioindicators. Endangered Species Research 8: 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jung, K, Threlfall, CG (2016) Urbanization and its effects on bats – a global meta-analysis. In: Bats in the Anthropocene: Conservation of Bats in a Changing World, eds Voigt, CC, Kingston, T, pp. 13–33. New York, NY, USA: Springer Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kery, M, Royle, JA (2016) Applied Hierarchical Modeling in Ecology: Analysis of Distribution, Abundance and Species Richness in R and BUGS. San Diego, CA, USA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Krauel, JJ, LeBuhn, G (2016) Patterns of bat distribution and foraging activity in a highly urbanized temperate environment. PLoS One 11: e0168927.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Legakis, A, Papadimitriou, C, Gaethlich, M, Lazaris, D (2000) Survey of the bats of the Athens metropolitan area. Myotis 38: 41–46.Google Scholar
Lewis, T, Dibley, GC (1970) Air movement near windbreaks and a hypothesis of the mechanism of the accumulation of airborne insects. Annals of Applied Biology 66: 477–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, H, Kalcounis-Rueppell, M (2018) Separating the effects of water quality and urbanization on temperate insectivorous bats at the landscape scale. Ecology and Evolution 8: 667–678.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Loeb, SC, Rodhouse, TJ, Ellison, LE, Lausen, CL, Richard, JD, Irvine, KM et al. (2015) A Plan for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat). General Technical Report SRS-208. Asheville, NC, USA: United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station [www document]. URL www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs208.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumsden, LF, Bennett, AF (2005) Scattered trees in rural landscapes: foraging habitat for insectivorous bats in south-eastern Australia. Biological Conservation 122: 205–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumsden, L, Bennett, AF, Krasna, S, Silins, J (1995) The conservation of insectivorous bats in rural landscapes of northern Victoria. In: People and Nature Conservation: Perspectives on Private Land Use and Endangered Species Recovery, eds Bennett, AF, Backhouse, G, Clark, T, pp. 142–148. Mosman, Australia: The Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.Google Scholar
Lumsden, LF, Bennett, AF, Silins, JE (2002) Location of roosts of the lesser long-eared bat Nyctophilus geoffroyi and Gould’s wattled bat Chalinolobus gouldii in a fragmented landscape in south-eastern Australia. Biological Conservation 106: 237–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mac Aodha, O, Gibb, R, Barlow, KE, Browning, E, Firman, M, Freeman, R, Harder, B, Kinsey, L, Mead, GR, Newson, SE, Pandourski, I, Parsons, S, Russ, J, Szodoray-Paradi, A, Szodoray-Paradi, F, Tilova, E, Girolami, M, Brostow, G, Jones, KE (2018) Bat detective – deep learning tools for bat acoustic signal detection. PLoS Computational Biology 14: e1005995.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mancina, CA, García-Rivera, L, Miller, BW (2012) Wing morphology, echolocation, and resource partitioning in syntopic Cuban mormoopid bats. Journal of Mammalogy 93: 1308–1317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCleery, RA, Monadjem, A, Baiser, B, Fletcher, R Jr, Vickers, K, Kruger, L (2018) Animal diversity declines with broad-scale homogenization of canopy cover in African savannas. Biological Conservation 222: 54–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mtsetfwa, F, McCleery, RA, Monadjem, A (2018) Changes in bat community composition and activity patterns across a conservation–agriculture boundary. African Zoology 53: 99–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norberg, UM, Rayner, JMV (1987) Ecological morphology and flight in bats (Mammalia; Chiroptera): wind adaptations, flight performance, foraging strategy and echolocation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 316: 335–427.Google Scholar
Ntzoufras, I (2009) Bayesian Modeling using WinBUGS. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ober, HK, Hayes, JP (2008) Influence of vegetation on bat use of riparian areas at multiple spatial scales. Journal of Wildlife Management 72: 396–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plummer, M (2003) JAGS: a program for analysis of Bayesian graphical models using Gibbs sampling. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing 124: 125.10.Google Scholar
Ratajczak, Z, Nippert, JB, Collins, SL (2012) Woody encroachment decreases diversity across North American grasslands and savannas. Ecology 93: 697–703.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reichert, BR, Sovie, AR, Udell, BJ, Hart, KM, Borkhataria, RR, Bonneau, M, Reed, R, McCleery, RM (2017) Urbanization may limit impacts of an invasive predator on native mammal diversity. Diversity and Distributions 23: 355–367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodhouse, TJ, Ormsbee, PC, Irvine, KM, Vierling, LA, Szewczak, JM, Vierling, KT (2015) Establishing conservation baselines with dynamic distribution models for bat populations facing imminent decline. Diversity and Distributions 21: 1401–1413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russo, D, Ancillotto, L (2015) Sensitivity of bats to urbanization: a review. Mammalian Biology 80: 205–212.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Su, Y, Yajima, M (2015) R2jags: a package for running jags from R. R package version 002-17 [www document]. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=R2jagsGoogle Scholar
Threlfall, CG, Mata, L, Mackie, JA, Hahs, AK, Stork, N, Williams, NSG, Livesley, SJ (2017) Increasing biodiversity in urban green spaces through simple vegetation interventions. Journal of Applied Ecology 54: 1874–1883.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Threlfall, CG, Ossola, A, Hahs, AK, Williams, NSG, Wilson, L, Livesley, SJ (2016) Variation in vegetation structure and composition across urban green space types. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 4: 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, W (2014). Sensing biodiversity. Science 346: 301–302.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
US Fish and Wildlife Service (2013) Endangered species status for the Florida bonneted bat. Federal Register 78(191): 61004–61043.Google Scholar
US Fish and Wildlife Service (2018) Range-wide Indiana bat summer survey guidelines. Bloomington, MN, USA: US Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwest Ecological Services Regional Office [www document]. URL www.fws.gov/southeast/pdf/guidelines/range-wide-indiana-bat-survey-guidelines-2018.pdfGoogle Scholar
Vitousek, PM, Mooney, HA, Lubchenco, J, Melillo, JM (1997) Human domination of Earth’s ecosystems. Science 277: 494–499.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webb, SD (1999) The south Florida ecosystem. In: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Multi-Species Recovery Plan for South Florida, pp. 1–84. Bethesda, MD, USA: Fish and Wildlife Service Reference Service.Google Scholar
White, CR, Cassey, P, Schimpf, NG, Halsey, LG, Green, JA, Portugal, SJ (2013) Implantation reduces the negative effects of bio-logging devices on birds. Journal of Experimental Biology 216: 537–542.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wickramasinghe, LP, Harris, S, Jones, J, Vaughan, N (2003) Bat activity and species richness on organic and conventional farms: impact of agricultural intensification. Journal of Applied Ecology 40: 984–993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilcove, D.S. Rothstein, D, Dubow, J, Phillips, A, Losos, E (1998) Quantifying threats to imperiled species in the United States: assessing the relative importance of habitat destruction, alien species, pollution, overexploitation, and disease. BioScience 48: 607–615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams-Guillen, K, Olimpi, E, Maas, B, Taylor, PJ, Arlettaz, R (2016) Bats in the anthropogenic matrix: challenges and opportunities for the conservation of Chiroptera and their ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. In: Bats in the Anthropocene: Conservation of Bats in a Changing World, eds Voigt, CC, Kingston, T, pp. 151–186, New York, NY, USA: Springer PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimmerman, GS, Glanz, WE (2000) Habitat use by bats in eastern Maine. Journal of Wildlife Management 64: 1032–1040.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zipkin, EF, Dewan, A, Royle, RA (2009) Impacts of forest fragmentation on species richness: a hierarchical approach to community modelling. Journal of Applied Ecology 46: 815–822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zwick, PD, Carr, MH (2006) Florida 2060. A Population Distribution Scenario for the State of Florida. Gainesville, FL, USA: University of Florida. A research project prepared for 1000 Friends of Florida [www document]. URL www.1000friendsofflorida.org/connecting-people/florida2060Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Bailey et al. supplementary material

Bailey et al. supplementary material 1

Download Bailey et al. supplementary material(File)
File 179.3 KB