bats in a farming landscape benefit from linear remnants and unimproved pastures蝙蝠在农业景观从线性残余和未被利用的牧场中获益.pdfVIP

Bats in a Farming Landscape Benefit from Linear Remnants and Unimproved Pastures 1,2 1 3 4 3 5 Pia E. Lentini *, Philip Gibbons , Joern Fischer , Brad Law , Jan Hanspach , Tara G. Martin 1The Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT, Australia, 2 School of Botany, The University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC, Australia, 3 Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany, 4 Forest Science Centre, NSW Primary Industries, Beecroft NSW, Australia, 5 CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, EcoSciences Precinct, Dutton Park QLD, Australia Abstract Schemes designed to make farming landscapes less hostile to wildlife have been questioned because target taxa do not always respond in the expected manner. Microbats are often overlooked in this process, yet persist in agricultural landscapes and exert top-down control of crop pests. We investigated the relationship between microbats and measures commonly incorporated into agri-environment schemes, to derive management recommendations for their ongoing conservation. We used acoustic detectors to quantify bat species richness, activity, and feeding in 32 linear remnants and adjacent fields across an agricultural region of New South Wales, Australia. Nocturnal arthropods were simultaneously trapped using black-light traps. We recorded 91,969 bat calls, 17,277 of which could be attributed to one of the 13 taxa recorded, and 491 calls contained feeding buzzes. The linear remnants supported higher bat activity than the fields, but species richness and feeding activity did not significantly differ. We trapped a mean 87.6 g ( 617.6 g SE) of arthropods per nigh