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Bat richness and activity in heterogeneous landscapes: guild-specific and scale-dependent?

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Abstract

Context

The conversion of natural environments into agricultural land has profound effects on the composition of the landscape, often resulting in a mosaic of human-altered and natural habitats. The response to these changes may however vary among organisms. Bats are highly vagile, and their requirements often imply the use of distinct habitats, which they select responding to both landscape and local features.

Objectives

We aimed to identify which features influence bat richness and activity within Baixo Vouga Lagunar, a heterogeneous landscape located on the Central-North Portuguese coast, and to investigate if that influence varies across a gradient of focal scales.

Methods

We sampled bats acoustically, while simultaneously sampling insects with light traps. We assessed the relationships between species richness, bat activity, and activity of eco-morphological guilds with landscape and local features, across four scales.

Results

Our results revealed both scale- and guild-dependent responses of bats to landscape and local features. At broader scales we found positive associations between open-space foraging bats and habitat heterogeneity and between edge-space foraging bats and greater edge lengths. Woodland cover and water availability at an intermediate scale and weather conditions and insect abundance at a local scale were the factors that mostly influenced the response variables.

Conclusions

Globally, our results suggest that bats are sensitive to local resource availability and distribution, while simultaneously reacting to landscape features acting at coarser scales. Finally, our results suggest that the responses given by bats are guild-dependent, and some habitats act as keystone structures for bats within this mosaic.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Observatoires Hommes-Milieux (OHM-CNRS) and the Municipality of Estarreja for co-funding and supporting the study. We are grateful to Norberto Monteiro for all the help in the field during the study period, and to everyone in the Wildlife Research Unit that helped in the planning and field execution of this study. We thank Ana Rainho for the support in the identification of some of the bat calls, and for valuable comments on a previous version of the manuscript, and João Carvalho for the insights on GIS analyses. We thank CUF and CESAMET for providing climate data, and USGS for satellite imagery. MJRP was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia postdoctoral grant SFRH/BPD/72845/2010. This work was co-supported by European Funds through COMPETE and by National Funds through the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) within project PEst-C/MAR/LA0017/2013. All insect sampling was carried out under the licenses number 385/2011/CAPT and 99/2012/CAPT (ICNF, Instituto da Conservação da Natureza e das Florestas).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology and Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal

    Eduardo S. Mendes, Carlos Fonseca, Sara F. Marques, Daniela Maia & Maria João Ramos Pereira

  2. PPGBAN, Departamento de Zoologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves 9500, Porto Alegre, RS, 91540-000, Brazil

    Maria João Ramos Pereira

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  1. Eduardo S. Mendes
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  3. Sara F. Marques
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  4. Daniela Maia
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  5. Maria João Ramos Pereira
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Correspondence to Eduardo S. Mendes.

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Mendes, E.S., Fonseca, C., Marques, S.F. et al. Bat richness and activity in heterogeneous landscapes: guild-specific and scale-dependent?. Landscape Ecol 32, 295–311 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-016-0444-0

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