Abstract
New World bats are involved in key ecological processes and are good indicators of environmental changes. Recently, trait-based approaches have been used in several taxa to better understand mechanisms underlying species assemblages, biotic interactions, environmental relationships and ecosystem functions. However, despite the relevance of bats on ecosystem dynamics, so far, there is no conceptual framework that relies on the measurement of bat traits to address functional studies. Here, we present a set of 50 bat biological traits, which are suitable to assess environmental stressors and can potentially affect ecological processes. Several examples were provided to show the applicability of this framework in the study of Neotropical bat ecology. We suggest some considerations regarding trait-based approach including the importance of intraspecific variation, correlations between traits, response-effect framework, global dataset, and future directions to assess the reliability of functional relations across species and Neotropical regions by using traits. This could be helpful in tackling ecological questions associated with community assembly and habitat filtering, species diversity patterns along environmental gradients, and ecological processes. We envision this paper as a first step toward an integrative bat functional trait protocol held up with solid evidence.
Highlights
Global biodiversity loss is a major concern that has motivated ecologists to explore the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Gross et al, 2017), especially under different scenarios of human impact (García-Morales et al, 2016)
We focused on the selection of traits that can be measured directly and quantitatively, but we presented categorical traits, which have been extensively used in several ecological studies (Cisneros et al, 2016; Castillo-Figueroa & PérezTorres, 2018; Farneda et al, 2019; Ramírez-Mejía et al, 2020)
We provided an extensive guide of biological traits for studying Neotropical bats with their respective description of measurement, definitions, attributes, trait obtention and ecological information
Summary
Global biodiversity loss is a major concern that has motivated ecologists to explore the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Gross et al, 2017), especially under different scenarios of human impact (García-Morales et al, 2016). Taxonomic diversity indices (e.g., Shannon, Simpson) ignore species differences in ecological roles (Villéger et al, 2010; Córdova-Tapia & Zambrano, 2016). Functional diversity approach has been a core topic research in community ecology and conservation biology over the last decades (García-Morales et al, 2016; Gross et al, 2017), due to the inclusion of ecological attributes of species. Functional diversity provides a comprehensive framework of causes, consequences, and mechanisms in the relations between species diversity and ecological processes (Córdova-Tapia & Zambrano, 2016)
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