Responses of Tropical Bats to Habitat Fragmentation, Logging, and Deforestation

Abstract

Land-use change is a key driver of the global biodiversity crisis and a particularly serious threat to tropical biodiversity. Throughout the tropics, the staggering pace of deforestation, logging, and conversion of forested habitat to other land uses has created highly fragmented landscapes that are increasingly dominated by human-modified habitats and degraded forests. In this chapter, we review the responses of tropical bats to a range of land-use change scenarios, focusing on the effects of habitat fragmentation, logging, and conversion of tropical forest to various forms of agricultural production. Recent landscape-scale studies have considerably advanced our understanding of how tropical bats respond to habitat fragmentation and disturbance at the population, ensemble, and assemblage level. This research emphasizes that responses of bats are often species and ensemble specific, sensitive to spatial scale, and strongly molded by the characteristics of the prevailing landscape matrix. Nonetheless, substantial knowledge gaps exist concerning other types of response by bats. Few studies have assessed responses at the genetic, behavioral, or physiological level, with regard to disease prevalence, or

An Amazonian rainforest and its fragments as a laboratory of global change

“…Regrowth forest adjoining fragment edges can also lessen edge‐effect intensity. Microclimatic changes (Didham & Lawton, ), tree mortality (Mesquita, Delamônica & Laurance, ) and edge avoidance by understorey birds (Develey & Stouffer, ; S.G. Laurance, Stouffer & Laurance, 2004; S.G. Laurance, 2004 a ) and gleaning animal‐eating bats (Sampaio, ; Meyer, Struebig & Willig, ; Rocha, ; Rocha et al, ) are all reduced when forest edges are buffered by adjoining regrowth forest, relative to edges bordered by cattle pastures. Mature regrowth can be particularly benign for some fauna; for example, diverse assemblages of aerial‐feeding insectivorous bats showed similar activity patterns in primary forest and in adjoining 30‐year‐old secondary forests (Navarro, ).…”

“…For bats, matrix recovery has resulted in marked compositional changes in fragments and shifts in the rank order of the most abundant species (Meyer et al, ; Rocha, ). Gleaning animal‐eating bats, which formerly occurred at low abundances in fragments (Sampaio, ) and young regrowth (Bobrowiec & Gribel, ), have increased over the past 10–15 years as the surrounding regrowth has expanded and matured (Meyer et al, ; Rocha, ; Rocha et al, ). A number of other species, including certain forest spiders (Mestre & Gasnier, ), dung beetles (Quintero & Roslin, ), euglossine bees (Becker, Moure & Peralta, ) and monkeys such as red howlers Alouatta seniculus , bearded sakis Chiropotes satanas and brown capuchins Cebus apella (Boyle & Smith, 2010 b ), have also recolonized some of the fragments.…”

“…) (Leidner et al, ). Bat assemblages also show atypically high species turnover (Meyer et al, ), as do understorey birds (Stouffer et al, , ), especially in smaller fragments. Streamflows are far more variable in fragmented than forested watersheds (Trancoso, ).…”

Changing resource landscapes and spillover of henipaviruses

“…Research on the effects of habitat fragmentation on frugivorous and nectarivorous bats has disproportionately focused on Neotropical species; surprisingly, little is understood about the direct impacts of land‐use change on pteropodid bats, or to what degree habitat fragmentation and increased distance between resource patches is tolerated (see Ref. ). However, abundant evidence demonstrates that altered resource landscapes are changing the movement behaviors of pteropodids.…”

Insectivorous Bats and Silviculture: Balancing Timber Production and Bat Conservation

“…We focus on three broad areas: North America, Australasia (including New Zealand), and Europe and refer the reader to Meyer et al (2016) (Chap. 3) for tropical forests. While the majority of studies included in this review are published in scientific journals, we also include information from the grey literature (e.g.…”