Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, United States of America.
U.S. Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Clemson, South Carolina, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Nov 8;13(11):e0206857. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206857. eCollection 2018.
Habitat loss, wind energy development, and the disease white-nose syndrome are major threats contributing to declines in bat populations in North America. In the southeastern US in particular, the recent arrival of white-nose syndrome and changes in landscape composition and configuration have driven shifts in bat species populations and distributions. Effective management strategies which address these large-scale, community-level threats require landscape-scale analyses. Our objective was to model the relationship between ecoregional and landscape factors and occupancy by all bat species in South Carolina, USA, during summer. We conducted acoustic surveys from mid-May through July 2015 and 2016 and evaluated temporally dynamic occupancy models for eight bat species or species groups at the 100 km2 level. We found significant effects of landscape factors such as ecoregion and forest edge density for three species, but habitat condition effects were not statistically significant for five other species. Thus, for some species, site-use analyses may be more appropriate than larger scale occupancy analyses. However, our occupancy predictions generally matched statewide historical distributions for all species, suggesting our approach could be useful for monitoring landscape-level trends in bat species. Thus, while our scale of study was likely too coarse for assessing fine-scale habitat associations for all bat species, our findings can improve future monitoring efforts, inform conservation priorities, and guide subsequent landscape-scale studies for bat species and community-level responses to global change.
栖息地丧失、风能开发以及疾病白鼻综合征是导致北美的蝙蝠数量下降的主要威胁。特别是在美国东南部，白鼻综合征的新近出现以及景观组成和结构的变化，导致了蝙蝠物种数量和分布的变化。应对这些大规模、社区层面威胁的有效管理策略需要进行景观尺度的分析。我们的目标是建立美国南卡罗来纳州夏季所有蝙蝠物种生态区和景观因素与占有性关系的模型。我们在 2015 年和 2016 年的 5 月中旬至 7 月进行了声学调查，并在 100 平方公里的水平上评估了八种蝙蝠物种或物种组的时间动态占有模型。我们发现，对于三种物种，景观因素（如生态区和森林边缘密度）具有显著影响，但对于另外五种物种，生境条件的影响在统计学上并不显著。因此，对于某些物种，基于地点的使用分析可能比更大尺度的占有分析更合适。然而，我们的占有预测通常与所有物种的全州历史分布相匹配，这表明我们的方法可能有助于监测蝙蝠物种的景观水平趋势。因此，尽管我们的研究规模对于评估所有蝙蝠物种的细粒度生境关联可能还不够精细，但我们的发现可以改进未来的监测工作，为保护优先级提供信息，并指导后续针对蝙蝠物种和社区水平对全球变化响应的景观尺度研究。
