Title
Dimensions of phyllostomid bat diversity and assemblage composition in a tropical forest-agricultural landscape
Date Issued
01 June 2020
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Loiselle B.A.
University of Florida
Publisher(s)
MDPI AG
Abstract
Tropical rainforests are suffering rapid habitat loss with large extensions of land transformed into agriculture. We wanted to know whether the type of agricultural activity in forest-agricultural landscapes affects how species composition as well as taxonomic and functional dimensions of diversity respond. We worked in the Amazon forests of southeast Peru and used bats as model organisms. We sampled mosaics characterized by forest adjacent to papaya plantations or cattle pastures. At each sampling site we established a transect in each of the three different vegetation types: forest interior, forest edge and agricultural land. We found that vegetation type was a better predictor of species composition than the type of agricultural land present. Vegetation structure characteristics explained differences in bat species composition between forest interior and edge. Agricultural land type chosen was not irrelevant as we found higher estimated species richness in papaya than in pasture sites. Agricultural land type present in a site and vegetation type affected functional diversity, with both agricultural land types showing a lower number of functionally distinct species than forests. We found papaya plantation sites showed species more evenly dispersed in trait space, suggesting they do better at conserving functional diversity when compared to cattle pasture sites. We demonstrate that sites that harbor agricultural activities can maintain a considerable proportion of the expected bat diversity. We note that this region still has large tracts of intact forest adjacent to agricultural lands, which may explain their ability to maintain relatively high levels bat diversity.
Volume
12
Issue
6
Number
238
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ecología
Conservación de la Biodiversidad
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85088302561
Source
Diversity
ISSN of the container
14242818
Sponsor(s)
Funds for this research were provided by Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society, Cleveland Zoological Society (CZS) and Cleveland Metroparks Zoo (CMZ), and Bat Conservation International. The exploratory field season (2015) was funded by Dr. Stephen Perz and Consorcio Madre de Dios. We thank Bruno Sanguinetti, Luis Masias, Jhon Farfán, Amanda Paredes, Nadia Mamani, Anggela Michi, Renzo Piana, Roberto Gutierrez, Juan Loja, Yessenia Apaza, and Luis Villena for their support during the exploratory field season (2015). We thank Sidney Novoa Sheppard for his support on image information, and Celia Estibur and Luis Chavez for their logistical support in Puerto Maldonado. We thank landowners who allowed access to their properties for the sampling period. We thank Brian Málaga, Juan Carlos Suaña, Yolanda Alcarraz, Diego Zavala, Luiggi Carrasco, Katherin Mares, A. Pinedo Malpartida, and Diego Juárez-Sánchez for their invaluable support during fieldwork. We thank Hugo T. Zamora-Meza for his support with identification of species, and Erika Paliza (CEBIO) who provided equipment for this study. We thank Rodrigo Medellín for useful early discussions of sampling design and preliminary results. We thank Diego Zavala for his support with map generation. We thank Francis "Jack" Putz, Andrew Noss, Luis Aguirre, Robert Fletcher for their valuable comments to the project design and data analysis. Finally, we thank anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments that helped to improve this manuscript.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus