Multi-scale habitat use to inform conservation of bats in eastern temperate forests
Creators: name: Drake, Evan C.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: Globally, bat conservation faces challenges from habitat loss, diseases, wind energy facilities, persecution, and lack of information. With the majority of bat species in need of management or research, bat conservation would greatly benefit from practices that increase the efficiency of monitoring. These conservation shortcuts take various forms, but they often involve the use of a surrogate. My research seeks to identify effective surrogates for North American bat conservation over three different spatial scales. My first chapter evaluates a potential indicator taxon over broad regional scales. My second chapter attempts to identify habitat characteristics that may serve as environmental indicators at a landscape scale. In my last chapter, I propose umbrella species for bat conservation by looking at small-scale habitat selection.In chapter 1, I use measures of cross-taxa congruence to evaluate insectivorous birds as a possible indicator taxon for bats in eastern temperate forests. To acquire data over vast spatial scales, I utilize mass-aggregated online resources for bat and bird observations over six consecutive years. Despite substantial overlap in broad-scale habitat associations, my results indicated only weak congruence between bats and birds. Therefore, the monitoring of insectivorous birds as a shortcut for bat conservation may have limited applications. However, mass-aggregated online resources may become a useful tool for conservation going forward. Because my results align well with known trends in bat and bird biodiversity, this project highlights the utility of mass-aggregated online resources for answering broad-scale ecological questions. Because habitat characteristics can also serve as indicators for biodiversity monitoring, I attempted to identify landscape-scale characteristics that are associated with greater bat activity in a habitat patch. Because golf courses provide a relatively consistent suite of patch-scale features, I monitored bat activity on golf courses for two consecutive years to explore the correlation between bat activity and the surrounding landscape. For most species, bat activity was greater on golf courses when the surrounding landscape contained fewer open spaces and more developed land. Courses with larger patches of forest in the surrounding landscape were used more often by rare bat species like Myotis spp., further suggesting that a golf course’s conservation value varies with its surrounding landscape. This research suggests that the surrounding landscape could be a useful indicator of bat community metrics in a habitat patch, thus providing a meaningful conservation shortcut.In my final chapter, I aim to identify certain bat species as potential conservation umbrellas according to their roost tree preferences. Many North American bat species rely on tree roosts during the maternity season during which they raise their pups. Therefore, management aimed at promoting availability of high-quality roosting habitat is an important conservation goal. I conducted a systematic review of roost-site characteristics of all tree-roosting bats in eastern temperate forests. After synthesizing the existing knowledge of roost tree preferences, I sorted the species into three roosting guilds using multi-variate statistical analyses. I propose Myotis septentrionalis and Perimyotis subflavus be considered for use as umbrella species for snag-roosting and foliage-roosting bats respectively. Both species display substantial overlap in their roosting niches with their guildmates, and their existing protections may extend to benefit other bats in their roosting guilds.This dissertation has provided important information on bat habitat associations across several spatial scales. These patterns may reveal potential shortcuts for bat conservation in the eastern temperate forests of North America.