Potential individual and interactive effects of climate and land-cover changes on bats and implications for conservation planning: a case study in Vietnam

Abstract

Climate and land-cover changes are among major threats to biodiversity. However, the interactive effects of the two threats are often overlooked in conservation planning. Using 81 bat species occurring in Vietnam as a case, we investigated the individual and interactive effects of climate and land-cover changes, highlighting the importance of this information for conservation efforts. By using species distribution models, we predicted the potential changes in range size among species and in species richness across Vietnam by the 2050s, considering projected climate and land-cover changes under two emission scenarios. Our results revealed that both threats individually would have predominantly negative effects on bats in Vietnam. Moreover, when these threats occur simultaneously, their interactions would generally intensify the impacts by mitigating individual positive effects and/or enhancing negative effects. However, we also found large interspecific and geographic variations in the direction and magnitude of these effects. Forest specialists, insectivores and cave-roosting species were predicted to be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects, with northern and southern Vietnam being more affected. These results underscore the urgent need to incorporate both climate and land-cover changes, as well as their interactions, into conservation planning for bats in Vietnam and biodiversity in general. The species-specific and spatially-explicit information regarding the impacts of the two threats can guide conservation actions, allowing us to target more manageable and less uncertain threats, as well as prioritize the protection of more vulnerable species.

Bat diversity in the Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam - Results from VIETBIO field training and annotated species list.

“…Moreover, the guano produced by bats, used as fertiliser, highlights their economic importance ( Sakoui et al 2020 ). Biodiversity decline, likely driven by factors such as habitat fragmentation and climate change, contributes to the endangerment of bats ( Festa et al 2022 , Tuan et al 2023 ). Therefore, bat diversity assessments are fundamental to provide information for conservation and management efforts and to understand how habitat fragmentation and climate change affect bat diversity in a country with such an immense species richness.…”