Fire is a major disturbance that affects ecological communities, and when fire events increase in frequency or extent, they may jeopardise biodiversity. Although long-term studies are irreplaceable to understand how biological communities respond to wildfires, a rapid, efficient assessment of the consequences of wildfire is paramount to inform habitat management and restoration. Although Species Distribution Models (SDMs) may be applied to achieve this goal, they have not yet been used in that way. In summer 2017, during an extended drought that affected Italy, a severe wildfire occurred in the Vesuvius National Park (southern Italy). We applied SDMs to assess how much potential habitat was lost by the 12 bat species occurring in the area because of the wildfire, and whether habitat fragmentation increased following the event. Our analysis supported the hypotheses we tested (i.e. that the fire event potentially affected all species through habitat reduction and fragmentation) and that the bat species potentially most affected were those adapted to foraging in cluttered habitat (forest). We show that SDMs are a valuable tool for a first, rapid assessment of the effects of large-scale wildfires, and that they may help identify the areas that need to be monitored for animal activity and phenology, and to assist in saving human and financial resources.
Climate change is among the key anthropogenic factors affecting species’ distribution, with important consequences for conservation. However, little is known concerning the consequences of distributional changes on community‐level interactions, and responses by generalist species might have many ecological implications in terms of novel interactions with resident species.
In this study, we applied Ecological Niche Models and niche analysis to three generalist bat species, Hypsugo savii, Pipistrellus kuhlii, and Pipistrellus pipistrellus, which share similar ecological traits and are sympatric in parts of their ranges. Our aims were to investigate how predicted climate change will affect species’ distribution and to analyse the degree of climatic niche overlap between the three species, in both the current and the future scenarios (2050 and 2070; Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5).
Temperatures were the most important predictors influencing species’ range expansion in future. According to our models, Pipistrellus kuhlii and Hypsugo savii may expand their geographic ranges towards northern latitudes, whereas the geographic range of the less thermophilous Pipistrellus will shift northwards, resulting in it losing the southern portion in Europe. The already considerable degree of climatic niche overlap between the three species will increase further in future.
On the basis of our findings, within the new areas potentially colonised by all three species in future, alterations in community‐level balance might occur, bringing about effects that are only partially predictable. In view of this, we highlight the need for further research and improved monitoring of bat communities in areas that are predicted to be particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Organisms sharing the same habitats may differ in small-scale microhabitat requirements or benefit from different management. In this study, set in Italy, we focused on two species of high conservation value, the cerambycid beetle Rosalia alpina and the bat Barbastella barbastellus, which often share the same forest areas and in several cases the same individual trees. We compared the potential distribution and, at two spatial scales, the niches between such species. The predicted distributions largely overlapped between the beetle and the bat. The niches proved to be similar on a broad scale, yet not on the plot one. Compared with B. barbastellus, R. alpina tends to occur at lower altitude in more irradiated sites with lower canopy closure and uses shorter trees with wider diameters. B. barbastellus occurred more often in trees within forest or along its edges, whereas R. alpina lays eggs in trees found in clearings. B. barbastellus plots were more frequent in forest, R. alpina plots in forested pasture and open-shredded forest. Overall, exposure to sun influenced more critically site and tree selection by R. alpina, as a warm microclimate is essential for larval development. Although B. barbastellus reproduction may be favored by warmer roosting conditions, bats may also find such conditions in dense forest and in strongly irradiated cavities high up in tall trees that project above the canopy. We emphasize that subtle differences in the ecological requirements of syntopic taxa could be missed at broad scales, so multiple-scale assessment is always advisable.
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