Disentangling effects of local and landscape variables on attractiveness of restored gravel‐sand pits for bat foraging activities

Abstract

Despite the impacts of extraction activities, quarries have great potential for conservation of biodiversity, and their restoration can be considered a major task in restoration ecology. A particularly important issue is to quantify the roles of the following various factors that may influence biodiversity and restoration success: (a) local variables, (b) landscape variables and (c) ecological management. Following a multi-model inference, we identify which variables were the most useful predictors of bat activity in gravel-sand pits. We used data from 21 French gravel-sand pits provided by the biodiversity-monitoring scheme, ROSELIERE. Our results suggest that within these restored gravel-sand pits, landscape variables appear to be better predictors of the attractiveness of restored gravel-sand pits for the foraging activity of bats than local variables. Species or community indexes appeared to be more sensitive to landscape variables measured at a large scale (i.e., 1,000 m). Among local variables, the time elapsed after operation was a better predictor of bat foraging activity than the description of the habitat itself. The effect was more obvious within a site with an elapsed time since operation greater than 10 years. Our findings suggest that to increase the attractiveness of gravel-sand pits for bat foraging activities, planning policies should consider not only the intrinsic characteristics of a project (i.e., local variables) but also the surrounding environment (i.e., landscape variables).

Calculation of biodiversity level between different land-uses to improve conservation outcomes of biodiversity offsetting

“…national and local population trends, red list), such information could be informative to give more weight to the species whose population dynamics are most sensitive to the project (Frick et al, 2017). Our framework did neither include uncertainty about the success of the measures and time delayed emergence of offsetting gains (Laitila et al, 2014;Bezombes et al, 2019;Kerbiriou and Laprun, 2020), for which further studies could propose improvements.…”

Acoustic activity of bats at power lines correlates with relative humidity: a potential role for corona discharges

“…Moreover, we followed recommendations from Oberpriller et al [ 50 ] and added the sampling year as an additional random effect, except for CWMBSD because of model non-convergence (whether sampling year was included as random or fixed effect). Species identity was added as a random factor in models for composite bat activity to account for non-independence of observations corresponding to the same species [ 51 ].…”