Foraging habitats of Myotis emarginatus in Central Europe

Abstract

We radio-tracked Myotis emarginatus in Upper Bavaria, Germany to identify the key-foraging habitats and to enable an adequate habitat management for this endangered species. The studied females foraged at a distance of up to 8.1 km around their colony roost. The average distance of the foraging area was 3.7 km, where 70% of foraging areas were located within a distance of 5 km and 90% within 6 km of the nurseries. Moreover, these bats spent about 75% of their foraging time within 5 km and 85% within a 6-km radius. To reach the foraging areas, the bats usually used riparian woodlands, hedges and tree lines as flight paths. Specifically, 46.9% of the foraging areas were located in forests, 24.5% in cow sheds, 18.4% in riparian woodlands along streams and 10.2% in fields, villages, orchards, hedges and groves on open land. On average, the bats foraged in forests for 56.2% of the time, during which habitat allocation was possible. In cow sheds the percentage was 29.2%, in riparian deciduous woodland 11.5% and in the other habitats 3.1%. Within forests M. emarginatus avoided foraging in spruce monocultures. Pure stands of spruce covered 45% of the total forest area, but only 10% of the foraging areas were located in this forest type. Deciduous forests on the other hand were much more common as foraging sites (40% versus 11%). Therefore, the availability of native deciduous forest and of fly-infested stables within a radius of 6 km around the colony roosts should be the focus of conservation concepts for M. emarginatus.

Testing the relevance of using spatial modeling to predict foraging habitat suitability around bat maternity: A case study in Mediterranean landscape

“…Consistent with the results obtained in other European studies, R. ferrumequinum and M. emarginatus were strongly dependent on the availability of deciduous woodland and riparian vegetation within a 5 km-distance of their maternity roost (Flaquer et al, 2008;Flanders and Jones, 2009;Zahn et al, 2010). This dependence on deciduous woodland and riparian vegetation is perhaps even more important in our case study because these habitats are rare in our study area.…”

“…This data is usually obtained through radio-tracking surveys (e.g. Flaquer et al, 2008;Zahn et al, 2010;Razgour et al, 2011), which are often intrusive for species and require significant financial investment and logistic organization. However, Bellamy et al (2013) showed that at a local scale, HSMs can also be built with data obtained by acoustic surveys.…”

Foraging Ecology Predicts Learning Performance in Insectivorous Bats

“…Associative learning of cues that indirectly indicate the presence of prey, and the flexibility to update these associations rapidly over time, should thus be more important in these bats than in the former two groups. As a representative of this group, we investigated M. emarginatus , a clutter specialist sympatric with the other two species in our study [41]–[44].…”

Conservación de colonias reproductoras de murciélagos cavernícolas mediante refugios artificiales.

“…La ausencia de otros refugios alternativos en los alrededores, probablemente ha impulsado a las colonias a ocupar estas casetas. Además puede ser determinante el hecho de que las casetas se sitúen en un lugar tranquilo, junto a un río bien conservado, con bosque de ribera que atraviesa un gran encinar y un pinar, lo cual constituye un hábitat muy adecuado para la cría de estas especies (Roué & Barataud 1999, Flaquer et al 2008, Zahn et al 2010). …”