Can citizen science provide a solution for bat friendly planning?

Abstract

Urban expansion is a severe threat to biodiversity. In the UK, bats are protected meaning new developments need to be surveyed, potential impacts assessed, and appropriate mitigation action taken. However, efforts to minimise effects of urbanisation on bats are hampered by a lack of data for many species making it difficult to implement effective conservation measures. Here we explore whether citizen science data on bat activity via a passive acoustic network can be used to produce maps of high risk areas to bats from urbanisation and areas with the best opportunities for habitat mitigation. We combine the passive acoustic dataset with fine-scale habitat data and use models to quantify the effect of increasing urban areas or increasing suitable habitat (woodland, wetland, or grass and heathland). Passive acoustic detection can provide a high volume of data and large area of coverage, which is vital to the success of this modelling approach, but the data quality is dependent on accurate species classification. Therefore, we also assess the effect of identification uncertainty on the accuracy of the risk and opportunity maps. We found agreement between results accounting for species uncertainty and those that did not was high, although approximately 15% of high-risk areas would have been missed, and about 23% of habitat creation opportunities falsely prioritised. This modelling and mapping approach has great potential for use in the planning process to reduce impacts on the most important habitat features in the landscape and enable targeted habitat creation.