Abstract
Tropical savannas are biomes of global importance under severe pressure from anthropogenic change, including land-cover and land-use change. Bats, the second-most diverse group of mammals, are critical to ecosystem functioning, but vulnerable to such anthropogenic stresses. There is little information on how savanna bats respond to land cover and land use, especially in Africa, limiting our ability to develop conservation strategies for bats and maintain the ecosystem functions and services they provide in this biome. Using acoustic monitoring, we measured guild-specific (aerial, edge, and clutter forager) responses of bat activity to both fine-scale vegetation structure and landscape-scale land-cover composition and configuration across the wet and dry seasons in a southern African savanna undergoing rapid land-cover and land-use change. Responses were guild- and season-specific but generally stronger in the dry season. Aerial and clutter bats responded most strongly to landscape metrics in the dry season (positive responses to savanna fragmentation and water cover, respectively) but fine-scale metrics in the wet season (positive responses to water cover and grass cover, respectively). Edge bats responded most strongly (negatively) to the distance to water in the dry season and fine-scale shrub cover in the wet season. Our results show it is possible to maintain high levels of bat activity in savanna mosaics comprised of different land covers and land uses. Bats, and the ecosystem services they provide, can be conserved in these changing landscapes, but strategies to do so must consider foraging guild, spatial scale, and seasonal variation in bat activity.
Highlights
Tropical savannas are biomes of global importance for people and wildlife (Bond and Parr, 2010; Murphy et al, 2016; Parr et al, 2014)
We found no correlations >0.7 among either the fine- or landscape-scale metrics that we used in our models
We found that all three guilds responded more to the landscape scale than the fine scale and this response was stronger in the dry season than the wet season, but each guild responded differently to the landscape (Table 3)
Summary
Tropical savannas are biomes of global importance for people and wildlife (Bond and Parr, 2010; Murphy et al, 2016; Parr et al, 2014). Savannas provide essential resources to people, especially in developing countries, such as pasture for livestock, firewood, thatching materials, and medicinal plants (Egoh et al, 2009; Fensham et al, 2005; Hoffmann et al, 2012; Parr et al, 2014; van der Werf et al, 2010) Despite their importance, tropical savannas are generally underappreciated, understudied and under-protected (Laurance et al, 2014; Parr et al, 2014), with less than 13% under any kind of official protection (Jenkins and Joppa, 2009). Changes in landscape configuration, regardless of the amount of cover, affect wildlife through edge effects, patch isolation, and loss of connectivity across the landscape (Fahrig, 2003)
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