Habitat associations of bats in a working rangeland landscape

Abstract

Land‐use change has resulted in rangeland loss and degradation globally. These changes include conversion of native grasslands for row‐crop agriculture as well as degradation of remaining rangeland due to fragmentation and changing disturbance regimes. Understanding how these and other factors influence wildlife use of rangelands is important for conservation and management of wildlife populations. We investigated bat habitat associations in a working rangeland in southeastern North Dakota. We used Petterson d500x acoustic detectors to systematically sample bat activity across the study area on a 1‐km point grid. We identified calls using Sonobat autoclassification software. We detected five species using this working rangeland, which included Lasionycteris noctivagans (2,722 detections), Lasiurus cinereus (2,055 detections), Eptesicus fuscus (749 detections), Lasiurus borealis (62 detections), and Myotis lucifugus (1 detection). We developed generalized linear mixed‐effects models for the four most frequently detected species based on their ecology. The activity of three bat species increased with higher tree cover. While the scale of selection varied between the four species, all three investigated scales were explanatory for at least one bat species. The broad importance of trees to bats in rangelands may put their conservation needs at odds with those of obligate grassland species. Focusing rangeland bat conservation on areas that were treed prior to European settlement, such as riparian forests, can provide important areas for bat conservation while minimizing negative impacts on grassland species.

Conservation Value to Bats: Assessing Multiple Functional Habitats in a Nature Preserve at the Urban-Agricultural Interface via Temporal Ecology

“…Over three years, we recorded all nine species of bats that occur in eastern Nebraska at Glacier Creek Preserve. Big brown, eastern red, hoary, and silver-haired bats were the most commonly recorded species, which is generally consistent with the results of acoustic research conducted recently in the same region, the northern Great Plains [57,58]. It is also not surprising that we recorded the evening bat regularly as this species is commonly captured in eastern Nebraska [59] and experiencing northward and westward range expansion [60,61].…”

Foraging habitat drives the distribution of an endangered bat in an urbanizing boreal landscape

“…Fortunately, there remains substantial opportunity for proactive conservation of bat habitat across relatively intact boreal landscapes. This is in contrast to reactive and often costly conservation and management of small remnant patches of habitat that are characteristic of more developed temperate regions (Russo et al 2016, Trubitt et al 2019). Given the growing list of human‐caused threats to bats, including climate change, natural resource development, disease, and urbanization (Voight and Kingston 2016), proactive management of their key habitats is more important than ever.…”

Extent, configuration and diversity of burned and forested areas predict bat richness in a fire-maintained forest

“…While edges and gaps are important features for foraging bats at finer scales (Loeb and O'Keefe 2011;Gonsalves et al 2012), excessive fragmentation of habitat is likely to reduce species richness (Trubitt et al 2019) e. Landscape extent and configuration variables are highly correlated across scales.…”