Adria Lopez-Baucells

Natural Sciences Museum of Granollers · BiBio - Biodiversity and Bioindicators

PREFACE This book is designed as a guide aimed at satisfying the needs of those conducting field work on bats in the Amazon. It is largely based on Lim et al. (2001), with modifications derived from both personal observations and three years of field experience in the Brazilian Amazon at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP),...

1. Chromatic disorders in bats are being reported worldwide at an increasing rate. However, there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of the associated terminology and concepts in the scientific literature. We conducted an extensive assessment and standardisation of published and unpublished cases of chromatic disorders in bats worldwide. 2....

Impact mitigation practices are currently one of the hottest topics in conservation and regarded as priorities worldwide. Forest bat populations are known to provide important ecosystem services such as pest control and bat boxes have become one of the most popular management options for counteracting the loss of roosts. However, bat boxes tend to...

Pest control through integrated pest management systems stands as a very convenient sustainable hazard-free alternative to pesticides, which are a growing global concern if overused. The ability of the soprano pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) to control the rice borer moth (Chilo supressalis), which constitutes a major pest of rice around th...

This field pocket guide compiles the 57 most common wild and native terrestrial mammals of Catalonia to facilitate their identification. It is designed for a general audience, aiming to be both engaging and scientifically rigorous

Bats are typically nocturnal. However, daylight activity (ie between one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset) is known for a small subset of species, often associated with small oceanic islands with no diurnal avian predators. Here, we describe numerous observations of diurnal activity of Horsfield’s bat (Myotis horsfieldii), in Gunung Mu...

The acoustics of small mammals, particularly dormice species, are generally understudied. During this study, we explored the vocalisations and acoustic behaviour of the edible dormouse (Glis glis) in various environments in Catalonia using ultrasound recorders. Up to five different types of calls were identified in various environmental conditions...

Considerable advances and breakthroughs in wildlife tracking technology have occurred in recent years, allowing researchers to gain insights into the movements and behaviours of a broad range of animals. Considering the accessibility and increase in use of tracking devices in wildlife studies, it is important to better understand the effects on the...

The Earth Hologenome Initiative (EHI) is a global collaboration to generate and analyse hologenomic data from wild animals and associated microorganisms using standardised methodologies underpinned by open and inclusive research principles. Initially focused on vertebrates, it aims to re-examine ecological and evolutionary questions by studying hos...

Forest loss and fragmentation are two of the most pressing threats to Amazonian biodiversity. This chapter examines the responses of bats, one of most species-rich Amazonian mammal groups, to anthropogenic forest fragmentation by providing an overview of the research conducted over the last decade at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Proj...

Passive forest restoration can buffer the effects of habitat loss on biodiversity. We acoustically surveyed aerial insectivorous bats in a whole-ecosystem fragmentation experiment in the Brazilian Amazon over a 2-year period, across 33 sites, comprising continuous old-growth forest, remnant fragments, and regenerating secondary forest matrix. We an...

Africa experiences frequent emerging disease outbreaks among humans, with bats often proposed as zoonotic pathogen hosts. We comprehensively reviewed virus–bat findings from papers published between 1978 and 2020 to evaluate the evidence that African bats are reservoir and/or bridging hosts for viruses that cause human disease. We present data from...

Mediterranean habitats will be one of the Eurasian ecosystems more strongly affected by Climate Change, especially their riverine systems. Monitoring these ecosystems, which are endemism hotspots and extremely sensitive to changes in rain regimes and extreme weather events like droughts, is of crucial importance. Decades of citizen science projects...

Understanding ecological niches is essential to comprehend the processes that allow similar species to occur sympatrically. Niche overlap can result in some degree of competition when resources are limited, and therefore, sympatric species must differ to some extent at some niche level in order to co-exist. The two trawling bats that co-occur along...

The media is a valuable pathway for transforming people's attitudes towards conservation issues. Understanding how bats are framed in the media is hence essential for bat conservation, particularly considering the recent fearmongering and misinformation about the risks posed by bats. We reviewed bat-related articles published online no later than 2...

Fighting insect pests is a major challenge for agriculture worldwide, and biological control and integrated pest management constitute well-recognised, cost-effective ways to prevent and overcome this problem. Bats are important arthropod predators globally and, in recent decades, an increasing number of studies have focused on the role of bats as...

Despite their paramount importance in molecular ecology and conservation, genetic diversity and structure remain challenging to quantify with traditional genotyping methods. Next-generation sequencing holds great promises, but this has not been properly tested in highly mobile species. In this article, we compared microsatellite and RAD-sequencing...

Biotic and abiotic environmental factors influence the abundance and spatial distribution of species and the structuring of communities along environmental gradients. Topography, vegetation structure and food availability have been identified as factors that directly and indirectly influence habitat selection by species in tropical forests. Althoug...

La Sociedad Aragonesa de Entomología ha editado el libro “Habitantes de la oscuridad. Fauna íbero-balear de las Cuevas”, una obra coordinada por Alberto Sendra, con la participación de un gran número de profesionales del ámbito, que a lo largo de 40 capítulos nos muestran los seres que encontramos en las cavidades de la Península Ibérica. Este lib...

Effective survey methods are paramount to measure changes in species distribution, populations dynamics and to guide conservation. Mist-netting and passive acoustic monitoring are two of the most used techniques to sample bats assemblages. Yet, despite the great potential of low-cost autonomous ultrasound recorders in surveying bat assemblages, we...

Edge effects, abiotic and biotic changes associated with habitat boundaries, are key drivers of community change in fragmented landscapes. Their influence is heavily modulated by matrix composition. With over half of the world’s tropical forests predicted to become forest edge by the end of the century, it is paramount that conservationists gain a...

Context Human-modified landscapes are globally ubiquitous. It is critical to understand how habitat loss and fragmentation impact biodiversity from both a local habitat context and landscape-scale perspective to inform land management and conservation strategies. Objectives We used an experimentally fragmented landscape in the Brazilian Amazon to...

Bat arousals during hibernation are related to rises in environmental temperature, body water loss and increasing body heat. Therefore, bats either hibernate in cold places or migrate to areas with mild winters to find water and insects to intake. During winter, insects are abundant in wetlands with mild climates when low temperatures hamper insect...

Due to their ability to disperse over water, over half of the extant bat species occur on islands and ca. 25% of these are island endemics. They are often the sole native island mammals and play key roles in the maintenance of insular ecosystems. Yet, due to increasing anthropogenic pressures, ca. 60% of island-restricted bats are now threatened. T...

Aim: Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroeco...

Mist nets set at ground level is the traditional method of surveying bats and in the Amazon, almost half of the bat surveys used this methodology. The sole use of ground-level mist nets biases surveys because of the lack of records of aerial insectivorous bats, which forage above the canopy or in other open areas. Canopy mist nets, roost searches a...

Throughout the tropics, regenerating secondary forests occupy vast areas previously cleared for agriculture and cattle ranching. However, despite the importance of regenerating forests in mitigating the pervasive negative consequences of forest loss and fragmentation on forest‐associated biodiversity, longitudinal studies on species' phylogenetic r...

The Biodiversity and Bioindicators research group (BiBIO), based at the Natural Sciences Museum of Granollers, has coordinated four long-term faunal monitoring programmes based on citizen science over more than two decades in Catalonia (NE Spain). We summarize the historical progress of these programmes, describing their main conservation outputs,...

Abstract Hydropower infrastructure represents a major driver of habitat loss and insular fragmentation worldwide, mostly across the tropics and sub‐tropics. Despite growing evidence of dam‐induced impacts on biodiversity, the effects of insular habitat fragmentation on species assemblages remain poorly understood, particularly for East Asian verteb...

During the last decades, the use of bioacoustics as a non‐invasive and cost‐effective sampling method has greatly increased worldwide. For bats, acoustic surveys have long been known to complement traditional mist‐netting, however, appropriate protocol guidelines are still lacking for tropical regions. Establishing the minimum sampling effort neede...

Changes in moonlight intensity can affect predation risk and induce changes in habitat use and activity of nocturnal species. However, the effect of moonlight on animal activity is rarely evaluated in human‐modified landscapes and can be of vital importance to understand possible changes in ecosystem services provided by light‐sensitive taxa, such...

Current intensification and expansion of agricultural lands are some of the main anthropogenic processes driving the global decline of biodiversity. Organic farming is generally regarded as a better compromise between production and ecosystems and biodiversity preservation. However, while this practice is gaining popularity worldwide, conventional...

The development of increasingly affordable ultrasonic detectors and automatic classifiers has increasingly boosted the use of acoustic recording of echolocation calls to survey bats all over the world. Echolocation call keys are crucial to reliably classify acoustic recordings, but those are not available for many regions, such as China. In the pre...

Animals modify their behaviours and interactions in response to changing environments. In bats, environmental adaptations are reflected in echolocation signalling that is used for navigation, foraging and communication. However, the extent and drivers of echolocation plasticity are not fully understood, hindering our identification of bat species w...

Human-bat interactions are common in rural areas across the tropics. Over 40 bat species occur in Madagascar, most of which are endemic. Forest loss is changing the distribution of bats throughout the island, with potential increases in both the abundance of synanthropic species and human-bat interactions. We set out to study knowledge of, interact...

Although elusive due to their mostly nocturnal behavior, bats have fascinated humans for millennia. From their ubiquitous presence in Mayan mythology to being regarded as symbols of good fortune in the Middle-to-Late Qing Dynasty of China, bats have been both feared and celebrated across cultures from all over the world. The research articles inclu...

Wetland areas have decreased by up to 33% globally over the past ten years, threatening the biodiversity they support and essential ecosystem services they provide. Despite this, the importance of wetlands for bat conservation and the consequences of losing these habitats are not comprehensively understood. • Through a systematic literature review,...

Indigenous Peoples have shaped and managed vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest for millennia. However, evaluations of how much biodiversity is governed under Indigenous stewardship are scarce. Here, we integrate geospatial data of officially recognized ITs across the Amazon biogeographic boundaries with the distribution range of >200 Amazonian bat...

The pyrodiversity begets biodiversity hypothesis suggests that wildfires drive habitat diversification, allowing species with different niches to coexist and increasing biodiversity. However, despite numerous wildfires studies, limited research has addressed species-specific effects of fire recurrence. We radio-tracked grey long-eared bats (Plecotu...

Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study des...

The Amazonian basin harbours some of the most bat-diverse ecosystems worldwide. Yet, information on elusive, high-flying bat species such as Molossidae is scarce or virtually missing in the literature, which hampers conservation efforts both locally and globally. The recent advent of new technologies specifically designed to survey bats, such as pa...

A participatory monitoring programme of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes during Covid-19 containment.

We face an increasing global food security challenge as the human population continues to grow across the globe. As agricultural production rises to keep up with food demand, so too does the expansion of crop detrimental pest species. Early detection can be crucial to control their damage and relies on the use of accurate and dependable techniques....

Monitoring programmes provide extremely helpful information to understand population dynamics and make effective management decisions, but they are usually constrained by methodological and economical limitations. Advances in bioacoustic technologies offer new opportunities for bat monitoring. In this study, we present a method to monitor small and...

BACKGROUND The fact that bats suppress agricultural pests has been measured for some particular dyads of predator and prey species in both economic and food security terms. The recent emergence of new molecular techniques allows for more precise screenings of bat's diet than the traditional visual identification systems and provides further evidenc...

Phyllostomids (New World leaf-nosed bats) are the ecologically most diverse bat family and have undergone the most extensive adaptive radiation of any mammalian family. However comprehensive, multi-species studies regarding phyllostomid echolocation are scarce in the literature despite abundant ecological research. In this study, we describe the ca...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Vertical stratification is a key component of the biological complexity of rainforests. Understanding community-and species-level responses to disturbance across forest strata is paramount for evidence-based conservation and management. However, even for bats, known to extensively explore multiple layers of the complex three-dimensional forest spac...

The use of functional information in the form of species traits plays an important role in explaining biodiversity patterns and responses to environmental changes. Although relationships between species composition, their traits, and the environment have been extensively studied on a case-by-case basis, results are variable, and it remains unclear...

Bats are well known for playing an important role in several ecosystem services such as arthropod population control, insect pest suppression in agricultural systems and vector disease control, but also for acting as ecologicalindicators. Their population dynamics are strongly linked to environmental variations and, in some cases, reflect the healt...

The traditional focus on taxonomic diversity metrics for investigating species responses to habitat loss and fragmentation has limited our understanding of how biodiversity is impacted by habitat modification. This is particularly true for taxonomic groups such as bats which exhibit species-specific responses. Here, we investigate phylogenetic alph...

Understanding geographic patterns of interaction between hosts and parasites can provide useful insight into the evolutionary history of the organisms involved. However, poor taxon sampling often hinders meaningful phylogenetic descriptions of groups of parasites. Trypanosome parasites that constitute the Trypanosoma cruzi clade are worldwide distr...

Habitat loss and fragmentation rank high amongst the most pressing threats to biodiversity. Understanding how variation in functional traits is associated with species vulnerability in fragmented landscapes is central to the design of effective conservation strategies. Here, we used a whole-ecosystem ecological experiment in the Central Amazon to i...

Habitat destruction is the single greatest anthropogenic threat to biodiversity. Decades of research on this issue have led to the accumulation of hundreds of data sets comparing species assemblages in larger, intact, habitats to smaller, more fragmented, habitats. Despite this, little synthesis or consensus has been achieved, primarily because of...

The extrinsic factors that most influence animal activity are weather and light conditions, which can be assessed at hourly, monthly, and even lunar-cycle timescales. We evaluated the responses of tropical aerial-insectivorous bats to temperature, rainfall, and moonlight intensity within and among nights. Temperature positively affected the activit...

We investigate how variation in patch area and forest cover quantified for three different spatial scales (buffer size of 500, 1500 and 3000 m radius) affects species richness and functional diversity of bat assemblages in two ecosystems differing in fragment–matrix contrast: a landbridge island system in Panama and a countryside ecosystem in the B...

Secondary forests and human-made forest gaps are conspicuous features of tropical landscapes. Yet, behavioural responses to these aspects of anthropogenically-modified forests remain poorly investigated. Here, we analyse the effects of small human-made clearings and secondary forests on tropical bats by examining the guild- and species-level activi...