Chiropteran diversity in the peripheral areas of the Maduru-Oya National Park in Sri Lanka: insights for conservation and management

Abstract

In Sri Lanka, there are 31 species of bats distributed from lowlands to mountains. To document bat diversity and their habitat associations, 58 roosting sites in Maduru-Oya National Park periphery were surveyed. Fifteen bat species were recorded occupying 16 different roosting sites in this area. Among all the species recorded, Rhinolophusrouxii was the most abundant species per roosting site whereas Kerivoulapicta was the least abundant. A road-kill specimen similar to genus Phoniscus was found during the survey, a genus so far only documented in Southeast Asia and Australasia. Although our study area provided habitats for a diverse chiropteran community, the colony size per roost was remarkably low. Although our study area is supposedly a part of the park’s buffer zone, many anthropogenic activities are threatening the bat community: felling large trees, slash-and-burn agriculture, excessive use of agrochemicals, vengeful killing, and subsidized predation. We strongly recommend adoption of wildlife-friendly sustainable land management practices in the buffer zone such as forest gardening, agroforestry (alley cropping, mixed-cropping), and integrated farming. Bat conservation in this region should take a landscape-scale conservation approach which includes Maduru-Oya National Park and other surrounding protected areas into a regional conservation network. Extents of undisturbed wilderness are dramatically declining in Sri Lanka; thus, future conservation efforts must be retrofitted into anthropocentric multiuse landscapes and novel ecosystems like areas surrounding Maduru-Oya National Park.

Bioclimatic Envelopes for Two Bat Species from a Tropical Island: Insights on Current and Future Distribution from Ecological Niche Modeling

“…(2) published historical accounts [3,10,36,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]; (3) the Global Biodiversity Information Facility [48]. Although distribution of K. picta is not limited to Sri Lanka, since our focal area is Sri Lanka, we did not use distribution records outside Sri Lanka.…”

“…Since the georeferenced points for K. malpasi were limited and spatially dispersed (on average, 35 km between any two nearest occurrence points), we did not perform any autocorrelation diagnoses. [3,10,36,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. New records are from unpublished data from personal observations of the authors and personnel communications with expert field biologists.…”

An Overview of Ecosystem Service Studies in a Tropical Biodiversity Hotspot, Sri Lanka: Key Perspectives for Future Research

“…Though these forest ecosystems play a vital role in local economies and livelihoods, through provision of traditional food and medicines, a low number of studies are related to those aspects. Most of the forest ecosystem studies are related to biodiversity [53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62].…”

Bats and fire: a global review

“…Africa and Asia contain vast areas that experience frequent fires (Archibald et al 2013) and increasing fire seasons are predicted with global climate change (Jolly et al 2015). Additionally, fire has been identified as a risk factor to the speciose bat communities of both regions (Suyanto and Struebig 2007;Edirisinghe et al 2018;McCleery et al 2018). The only study that has investigated the relationship between bats and fire in Africa was based on species' range maps rather than direct observations (Beale et al 2018).…”