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Deciduous trees increase bat diversity at stand and landscape scales in mosaic pine plantations

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Abstract

Context

In heterogeneous landscapes, habitat complementation is a key process underlying the distribution of mobile species able to exploit non-substitutable resources over large home ranges. For instance, insectivorous bats need to forage in a diversity of habitat patches offering varied compositions and structures within forest landscape mosaics to fulfill their life cycle requirements.

Objectives

We aimed at analyzing the effects of forest structure and composition measured at the stand and landscape scales on bat species richness, abundance and community composition in pine plantation forests of south-western France.

Methods

We sampled bat communities at different periods of the summer season using automatic ultrasound recorders along a tree composition gradient from pine monocultures to pure oak stands. We analyzed bat species activity (as a proxy for bat abundance) and species richness with linear mixed models. Distance-based constrained ordinations were used to partition the spatio-temporal variation in bat communities.

Results

Deciduous tree cover increased bat activity and modified community composition at both stand and landscape scales. Changes in bat communities were mostly driven by landscape-scale variables while bat activity responded more to stand-scale predictors.

Conclusions

The maintenance of deciduous trees at both stand and landscape scales is likely critical for bat communities living in fast-growing conifer plantations, by increasing the availability and diversity of prey and roosting sites. Our study suggests that bats respond to forest composition at both stand and landscape scales in mosaic plantation landscapes, mainly through a resource complementation process.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Groupama and Office National des Forêts for the permission to access their sites. We also thanks C Kerbiriou, C Vacher, F Archaux, M Deconchat, A Theillout, F Vetillard, B Castagneyrol, Groupe Chiroptères d’Aquitaine and Elyomis for their help and EG Brockerhoff for improving the English. JYB received partial funding from the Aarhus University Research Foundation and the Aquitaine Regional Council, and YC, IVH, HJ and LB benefited from partial fundings for the FunDivEurope project, European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant agreement No 265171.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRA, UMR 1202 BIOGECO, 33610, Cestas, France

    Yohan Charbonnier, Inge van Halder, Julien Nezan, Hervé Jactel & Luc Barbaro

  2. UMR 1202, BIOGECO, Univ. Bordeaux, 33600, Pessac, France

    Yohan Charbonnier, Inge van Halder, Julien Nezan, Hervé Jactel & Luc Barbaro

  3. Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution, UMR CNRS-UM2 5554, 34095, Montpellier, France

    Pierre Gaüzère

  4. Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Biosciences, Aarhus University, 8000, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jean-Yves Barnagaud

  5. CEFE UMR 5175, CNRS - Université de Montpellier, EPHE, 34293, Montpellier, France

    Jean-Yves Barnagaud

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  1. Yohan Charbonnier
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  2. Pierre Gaüzère
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  3. Inge van Halder
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  7. Luc Barbaro
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Correspondence to Luc Barbaro.

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Charbonnier, Y., Gaüzère, P., van Halder, I. et al. Deciduous trees increase bat diversity at stand and landscape scales in mosaic pine plantations. Landscape Ecol 31, 291–300 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-015-0242-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-015-0242-0

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