Abstract
AbstractNorth American bat populations face unprecedented threats from disease and rapid environmental change, requiring a commensurate strategic conservation response. Protected‐area networks have tremendous potential to support coordinated resource protection, disease surveillance, and population monitoring that could become a cornerstone of 21st‐century bat conservation. To motivate this idea, we develop a macroecological perspective about bat diversity and associated conservation challenges and opportunities on U.S. National Park Service (NPS) lands. We compared occurrence records from parks against published range maps. Only 55 (19%) of parks reported as present ≥90% of the bat species expected based on range maps, highlighting the information‐gap challenge. Discrepancies suggest substantial under‐reporting and under‐sampling of bats on NPS lands; inadequate range maps and habitat specificity are implicated for some species. Despite these discrepancies, 50 species, including several range‐restricted and endangered taxa, were reported in at least one park unit, including those in the Caribbean and tropical Pacific. Species richness increased with park area at a rate (z) of ~0.1, a pattern confounded by covariation with latitude, elevation, and habitat. When accounting for these factors, richness decreased predictably at higher latitudes and increased at mid‐elevations and with greater numbers of keystone underground habitat structures (caves and mines), reflecting a strong species–energy relationship. The inclusion of covariates that represented percentage of natural vs. human‐modified (converted) landscapes and elevation range—a proxy for environmental heterogeneity—was uninformative. White‐nose syndrome (WNS) presents a tremendous challenge to the NPS: All 12 species currently known to be affected by the disease or to host the causal fungus are represented in the NPS system. One hundred and twenty‐seven NPS parks are in counties currently or likely to become WNS‐positive by 2026. All parks are expected to experience increasing temperatures in coming decades; forecasted climate change velocity is particularly high (>1 SD) for 50 parks. Seventeen parks are in the vicinity of high (>1 SD) wind turbine density. Based on these biogeographic patterns, we suggest ways to prioritize NPS parks for additional inventories, monitoring, and resource protection. Our results demonstrate how macroecology and bioinformatics together can guide strategic conservation capacity‐building among protected areas.
Highlights
North American bat populations face novel and growing threats from white-nose syndrome (WNS; Blehert et al 2009, Maher et al 2012, Warnecke et al 2012, O’Regan et al 2015), accelerated rates of wind energy development (Arnett et al 2008, Arnett and Baerwald 2013), land use change (Russo and Ancillotto 2015, Jung and Threlfall 2016), and accelerated climate change (Humphries et al 2002, Jones et al 2009, Adams 2010, Sherwin et al 2013)
(1) What is the distribution of species among National Park Service (NPS) park units? (2) Do macroecological patterns of bat species richness reflect hypothesized species–area and species-energy relationships? (3) Which parks have substantial numbers of bat species, or rare or threatened species, and might be prioritized for NPS bat conservation? (4) Which parks with important bat resources are at high risk of WNS, wind power development, climate change, and urbanization and other land use changes? We provide an attributed list of parks as a reference that helps answer these questions and that can be used to v www.esajournals.org prioritize strategic investments in bat conservation activities across the NPS
We provide the first comprehensive review of the bat species occurring within the NPS system, and the associated potential of NPS to contribute to North American bat conservation
Summary
North American bat populations face novel and growing threats (see O’Shea et al 2016 for a review) from white-nose syndrome (WNS; Blehert et al 2009, Maher et al 2012, Warnecke et al 2012, O’Regan et al 2015), accelerated rates of wind energy development (Arnett et al 2008, Arnett and Baerwald 2013), land use change (Russo and Ancillotto 2015, Jung and Threlfall 2016), and accelerated climate change (Humphries et al 2002, Jones et al 2009, Adams 2010, Sherwin et al 2013). Despite advances in acoustic detection methods and other technologies, understanding the impacts of these threats on populations and across entire species’ ranges continues to be limited by the challenges associated with studying the cryptic and overdispersed habits of bats (O’Shea et al 2003, Hayes et al 2009, Weller et al 2009, Meyer 2015). This information gap hampers effective conservation, and bat conservation efforts generally lag behind those being made for other at-risk taxa, including birds, amphibians, and some of the larger marine and terrestrial mammals. Macroecological analyses of bats in North America and on other continents have demonstrated strong and predictable latitudinal and elevational gradients in species richness (Kaufman and Willig 1998, Stevens and Willig 2002, Rodriguez and Arita 2004, McCain 2007), suggesting a strong species–energy relationship (SER; Wright 1983, Hawkins et al 2003)
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