Going beyond species richness and abundance: robustness of community specialisation measures in short acoustic surveys

Abstract

Passive Acoustic Monitoring offers promising opportunities for biodiversity assessments and species conservation and is still in development. The robustness of community metrics depends on sampling effort and acoustic surveys should be adjusted for cost-effectiveness. Using a large-scale acoustic survey of bat assemblages conducted along 5487 survey nights across France, we assessed the effect of sampling duration on the level of confidence of four community metrics (total bat activity, species of conservation concern activity, species richness, and community specialisation index). We further investigated whether this effect varied across habitats and seasons. Overall, a high level of confidence (i.e., 95% similarity between cumulated survey nights) was reached after 2 to >20 sampling nights, depending on the community metric, the habitat and the season considered. CSI required the lowest sampling duration. A higher sampling duration was required in three-dimensionally structured habitats (e.g., forests) and habitats unfavourable to bats (e.g., intensive farmlands), while a high degree of confidence was reached earlier in more favourable habitats and non-intensive farmlands, and during the season of higher activity. Beyond providing recommendations for the design of context-dependent minimum sampling duration in acoustic surveys, we show that weighted community indices such as the CSI are efficient summary measures, and advocate for their use when monitoring resources are limited.