Abstract
The conversion of natural areas for the advancement of economic activities such as agriculture, mining, livestock, and energy production are the main challenges for biodiversity conservation in Brazil. The establishment and expansion of protected areas (PA) are the cheapest way to ensure biodiversity protection and the maintenance of ecosystem services provided by it. Chiroptera is one of the most diverse group of mammals, responsible for several ecological functions such as seed dispersal, insect population control and pollination. The aim of our study was to estimate the degree of protection that PAs in Brazil guarantee for bats. Species distribution models were built to estimate the distribution of 173 bat species in the Brazilian territory. Then, we performed a gap analysis to assess the effectiveness of PAs in ensure protection for bats, regarding the administrative level and the type of PA. In general, federal PAs were more efficient in ensuring bat protection than state PAs. Strictly PAs alone are insufficient to protect 67.6% bats, including all endangered bats at national level. Sustainable use areas have a complementary role to achieve the established conservation goals, besides this is not its main purpose. However, more efforts are needed to ensure an effective representation of bat diversity in PAs. Our study shows the need for a more integrated systematic conservation planning that incorporates the federal and local levels. In addition, the inclusion of other types of areas such as indigenous lands and private areas could be effective strategies to ensure that protection goals are met.
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Data availability
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the Supplementary material.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 through a scholarship to FPS. PDM received continuous productivity grants from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) (310547/2020-2). We thank Fabricio Villalobos and Lucas Gonçalves da Silva for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
Funding
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 through a scholarship to FPS. PDM received continuous productivity grants from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) (310547/2020-2).
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Felipe Pessoa da Silva: Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Paulo De Marco Júnior: Conceptualization, Supervision, Resources, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Pessoa da Silva, F., De Marco Júnior, P. The role of protected areas in safeguarding bat diversity in Brazil. Biodivers Conserv 32, 2909–2924 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-023-02635-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-023-02635-6