Jeremy Froidevaux

University of Franche-Comté | UFC · UMR 6249 Laboratoire Chrono-Environnement

Isolated trees are increasingly recognised as playing a vital role in supporting biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, yet their occurrence has declined substantially in recent decades. Most bats in Europe are tree-dependent species that rely on woody elements in order to persist in farmlands. However, isolated trees are rarely considered in con...

Knowledge of species' functional traits is essential for understanding biodiversity patterns, predicting the impacts of global environmental changes, and assessing the efficiency of conservation measures. Bats are major components of mammalian diversity and occupy a variety of ecological niches and geographic distributions. However, an extensive co...

With the ever-increasing dependency on electric power, electrical grid networks are expanding worldwide. Bats exhibit a wide diversity of foraging and flight behaviours, and their sensitivity to anthropogenic stressors suggests this group is very likely to be affected by power lines in a myriad of ways. Yet the effects of power lines on bats remain...

Context There is a long-standing quest in landscape ecology for holistic biodiversity metrics accounting for multi-taxa diversity in heterogeneous habitat mosaics. Passive acoustic monitoring of biodiversity may provide integrative indices allowing to investigate how soundscapes are shaped by compositional and configurational heterogeneity of mosai...

Despite mounting evidence on the ecological impacts of damming for biodiversity, little is known regarding its consequences in the hyper-diverse Southeast Asian tropical forests. Here we assess the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on the diversity and activity of insectivorous bats within the hydroelectric Kenyir Lake in peninsular Malaysi...

Combining renewable energy planning and biodiversity conservation is urgently needed to address the interconnected climate change and biodiversity loss crisis and meet the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals 7,13, and 15. However, in many countries such as France, current strategies to limit the negative effects of renewable energy on bio...

A global energy transition to using sustainable renewable sources is being driven by global agreements. Simultaneously there is a call for increased biodiversity conservation. This creates a green-green dilemma, where the expansion of renewables could lead to the demise of biodiversity if not carefully assessed, managed and monitored. Recognition o...

Reconciling renewable energy planning and biodiversity conservation is urgently needed to address the interconnected crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. However, current strategies to avoid or limit the negative effects of renewable energy on biodiversity still hold major limitations during the planning process that could be overcome wi...

Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe.From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought togetherby the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acousticchanges in urban areas. We present this collection her...

Ecoacoustics, the study of environmental sound, is a rapidly growing discipline offering ecological insights at scales ranging from individual organisms to whole ecosystems. Substantial methodological developments over the last 15 years have streamlined extraction of ecological information from audio recordings. One widely used set of methods are a...

There is an unprecedented exposure of living organisms to mobile communications radiofrequency electromagnetic field (RF‐EMF) emissions. Guidelines on exposure thresholds to limit thermal effects from these emissions are restricted to humans. However, tissue heating can occur in all living organisms that are exposed. In addition, exposure at millim...

The need for remote, reliable, and scalable monitoring of plummeting biodiversity amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems and changing climate has sparked enormous interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) over multiple disciplines and ecosystems. Even though PAM could support UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity I...

The unprecedented exposure of radiofrequency electromagnetic field (RF‐EMF) to humans from mobile communications raises serious public concern about the possibility of unexpected adverse health effects and has stimulated authorities to adopt precautionary exposure limits. These limits are distinctly different across countries, and the causes of the...

The impacts of fragmentation are often overlooked in landscape studies investigating how habitat loss impacts biodiversity, despite the casual relationship linking both processes. As habitat loss is the primary cause of fragmentation, understanding the inter-related effects of these twin processes on biodiversity is key to minimise biodiversity los...

With the rapid global expansion of mobile communication networks and the introduction of new radiofrequencies, especially above 6 GHz with the emergence of 5G/6G technology, there is an urgent requirement to investigate and tackle the possible effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic field emissions on wildlife. Here, we highlight (i) the pressing...

Efforts to mitigate the climate crisis result in a green‐green dilemma: the development of renewable energy technology is required worldwide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but can have negative impacts on biodiversity. Impacts are being documented for wind farms, but effects of solar farms (photovoltaic power stations) on habitat use of vertebr...

Background To phase out fossil fuels and reach a carbon–neutral future, solar energy and notably photovoltaic (PV) installations are being rapidly scaled up. Unlike other types of renewable energies such as wind and hydroelectricity, evidence on the effects of PV installations on biodiversity has been building up only fairly recently and suggests t...

Renewable energy is growing at a rapid pace globally but as yet there has been little research on the effects of ground‐mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) developments on bats, many species of which are threatened or protected. We conducted a paired study at 19 ground‐mounted solar PV developments in southwest England. We used static detectors to reco...

The COVID-19 shutdown has caused a quasi-experimental situation for ecologists in Spring 2020, providing an unprecedented release in acoustic space for avian soundscapes due to the lowest technophony levels experienced for decades. We conducted large-scale passive acoustic monitoring in 68 forest stands during and after the shutdown to compare thei...

The effectiveness of organic farming on biodiversity has been widely documented especially for plants, arthropods and birds; however, the effects of the transition period required to become an organic farm on wildlife remain poorly understood. We assessed the effects of organic farming on insectivorous bats in citrus orchards in the Republic of Cyp...

Ecological Infrastructures (EIs) form a network of natural and semi-natural areas crucial to support biodiversity in human-altered landscapes. Several indices have been proposed to assess the ecological quality of EIs, but these have been seldom tested using animal biodiversity as a response variable. The Habitat Ecological Infrastructure's Diversi...

Diverse landscapes consisting of mixed crops are expected to support higher biological control, while also contributing to maintain farmland biodiversity. Although bats are known as predators of many farming pests, few studies to date have investigated how their foraging activity may enhance natural pest control. Here, we tested the hypothesis that...

Solar energy is an important renewable energy source. However, the ecological effects of solar farms are largely unknown. Behavioral experiments proved previously that smooth surfaces, such as solar panels act as sensory traps for bats and insects, increasing collision risk, and suggesting that solar farms may affect local ecosystems in a complex w...

Voigt et al. (2021) provide a thorough analysis of the restrictions inherent to the estimation of bat abundance from acoustic surveys, and conclude that limitations of acoustic monitoring impede the reliable evaluation of bat fatalities at wind turbines. We argue that acoustic data recorded at the nacelle of wind turbines have been experimentally v...

Wind turbine development is growing exponentially and faster than other sources of renewable energy worldwide. While multi-turbine facilities have small physical footprint, they are not free from negative impacts on wildlife. This is particularly true for bats, whose population viability can be threatened by wind turbines through mortality events d...

Despite mounting evidence on the ecological impacts of damming for biodiversity, little is known regarding its consequences in the hyper-diverse Southeast Asian tropical forests. Here we assess the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on the diversity and activity of insectivorous bats within the hydroelectric Kenyir Lake in peninsular Malaysi...

Background Climate change and the current phase-out of fossil fuel-fired power generation are currently expanding the market of renewable energy and more especially photovoltaic (PV) panels. Contrary to other types of renewable energies, such as wind and hydroelectricity, evidence on the effects of PV panels on biodiversity has been building up onl...

Wind power generation has grown exponentially over the past 20 years to meet international goals of increasing the share of renewables in energy production. Yet, this process has too often been conducted at the cost of airborne biodiversity such as birds and bats. The latter are severely threatened due to deaths by collision at wind turbine. The UN...

L’étude des systèmes écologiques est souvent rendue difficile car certaines composantes échappent à une observation parfaite, comme les trajectoires d’animaux en mouvement ou la banque de graines des plantes. La modélisation statistique permet de traiter efficacement ces composantes cachées en utilisant le cadre des variables latentes, qui permet d...

Ecological infrastructures (EI), defined as natural or semi-natural structural elements, are important to support biodiversity and could play a crucial role in counteracting the well-known impacts of intensive agriculture. Yet, the importance of EI remains largely unexplored in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes and for species providing essenti...

Os morcegos representam um quinto dos mamíferos terrestres e na Europa todas as espécies alimentam-se de insectos.

Ecological infrastructures (EI), defined as natural or semi-natural structural elements, are important to support biodiversity and could play a crucial role in counteracting the well-known impacts of intensive agriculture. Yet, the importance of EI remains largely unexplored in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes and for species providing essenti...

Structural equation models (SEMs) provide a statistical framework for compact representations of theories concerning the relations between components in a socio‐ecosystem. In this chapter, the authors show how SEMs maintain statistical power in cases with large numbers of observed variables, combining variables into groups and linking them to subja...

Aim Animal movement determines home range patterns, which in turn affect individual fitness, population dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Using temperate bats, a group of particular conservation concern, we investigated how morphological traits, habitat specialization and environmental variables affect home range sizes and daily foraging movement...

The relevance of riparian areas to improve nature condition and human well-being is widely acknowledged. These are also important in intensive agricultural landscapes to mitigate effects caused by farming intensification, negatively affecting nature and “nature´s contributions to people” (NCP). However, current EU agricultural policies (eg, CAP) ne...

Scientists have warned decision-makers about the severe consequences of the global environmental crisis since the 1970s. Yet ecological degradation con- tinues and little has been done to address climate change. We investigated early-career conservation researchers' (ECR) perspectives on, and prioritization of, actions furthering sustainability. We...

Despite the key importance of the landscape matrix for bats, we still not fully understand how the effect of forest composition interacts at combined stand and landscape scales to shape bat communities. In addition, we lack detailed knowledge on the effects of local habitat structure on bat-prey relationships in forested landscapes. We tested the a...

Conserving functionally diverse bird communities in European farmland is becoming critical, with no exception for regions of wine production. Management intensification combined with the loss of semi‐natural habitats in wine‐growing landscapes has led to a long‐term decline not only in birds of conservation concern but also in once common insectivo...

Passive Acoustic Monitoring offers promising opportunities for biodiversity assessments and species conservation and is still in development. The robustness of community metrics depends on sampling effort, and acoustic surveys should be adjusted for cost-effectiveness. Using a large-scale acoustic survey of bat assemblages conducted along 5,487 sur...

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.

The Handbook summarizes all the key steps in conducting an acoustic survey of a bat community, including project planning, strategies for data collection, approaches to analysis and interpretation, a guide to purchasing a bat detector, and a series of case studies. Chapter 1 (“Introduction to bat echolocation”) provides a broad introduction to the...

The disturbance, damage and destruction of roosts are key drivers of bat population declines worldwide. In countries where bats are protected by law, bat roost surveys are often required to inform ecological impact assessments. Yet, evidence-based information on survey methodology to detect bat roosts is crucially lacking, and failing to detect a r...

Connectivity among jaguar (Panthera onca) populations will ensure natural gene flow and the long-term survival of the species throughout its range. Jaguar conservation efforts have focused primarily on connecting suitable habitat in a broad-scale. Accelerated habitat reduction, human-wildlife conflict, limited funding, and the complexity of jaguar...

Background: Connectivity among jaguar (Panthera onca) populations will ensure natural gene flow and the long-term survival of the species throughout its range. Jaguar conservation efforts have focused primarily on connecting suitable habitat in a broad-scale. Accelerated habitat reduction, human-wildlife conflict, limited funding, and the complexi...

Background Connectivity among jaguar (Panthera onca) populations will ensure natural gene flow and the long-term survival of the species throughout its range. Jaguar conservation efforts have focused primarily on connecting suitable habitat in a broad-scale. Accelerated habitat reduction, human-wildlife conflict, limited funding, and the complexity...

Background: Effective connectivity between jaguar ( Panthera onca ) populations across the American continent will ensure the natural gene flow and the long-term survival of the species throughout its range. Jaguar conservation efforts have focused primarily on connecting suitable habitat in a broad-scale. However, accelerated habitat reduction, li...

Increasing the proportion of unmanaged forests in multi-functional forest landscapes is a primary goal of international and national conservation strategies aiming at restoring natural properties in structurally simplified forests. However, the development of structural features and associated habitat suitability for forest species is largely unkno...

Mitigating the detrimental impacts of intensive farming on biodiversity requires the implementation of cost‐effective conservation actions. Targeted agri‐environment schemes (AESs) to enhance populations of threatened species inhabiting farmland have been proposed for this purpose, yet their effectiveness for nocturnal wildlife remains unknown. We...

Background: Flying foxes (Chiroptera: Pteropodidae) are large bats that often roost in the sun, hence solar-powered GPS/GSM devices can track their movements over extended periods. The endemic Mauritian flying fox (Pteropus niger) has recently been subjected to large-scale culling because of perceived damage to commercial fruit, and a consequent re...

Background Flying foxes (Chiroptera: Pteropodidae) are large bats that often roost in the sun, hence solar-powered GPS/GSM devices can track their movements over extended periods. The endemic Mauritian flying fox (Pteropus niger) has recently been subjected to large-scale culling because of perceived damage to commercial fruit, and a consequent red...

Hedgerows provide valuable habitats and corridors for many species in farmland, yet a lack of appropriate management may threaten their benefits to biodiversity. Although agri-environment scheme (AES) prescriptions on hedgerow management have the potential to reverse the detrimental effect of over-trimming on wildlife, their effectiveness has rarel...

The endemic Mauritian flying fox Pteropus niger is perceived to be a major fruit pest. Lobbying of the Government of Mauritius by fruit growers to control the flying fox population resulted in national culls in 2015 and 2016, with a further cull scheduled for 2018. A loss of c. 38,318 individuals has been reported and the species is now categorized...

Collecting information on bat prey availability usually involves the use of light traps to capture moths and flies that constitute the main prey items of most insectivorous bats. However, despite the recent awareness on the adverse effects of light on bats, little is known regarding the potential impacts of light trapping on the bat sampling outcom...

Declines of biodiversity in European farmland ecosystems have been substantially attributed to agricultural intensification. Agri-Environment Schemes (AESs) have been introduced and promoted by the European Union to address this issue, yet their effectiveness has been questioned and still remains to be tested for many taxa including bats (Chiropter...

Supplementary material

The effectiveness of organic farming for promoting biodiversity has been widely documented, yet most studies have been undertaken in temperate agroecosystems with a focus on birds, insects and plants. Despite the Mediterranean basin being a biodiversity hotspot for conservation priorities, the potential benefits of organic farming for biodiversity...

Although populations of many bat species appear to be recovering in some European countries, the extrinsic and intrinsic factors driving these increases have not yet been assessed. Disentangling the benefits of conservation management from other factors such as climate change is a crucial step for improving evidence-based conservation strategies. W...

BCT are investigating ways of using static bat detectors to monitor bat populations in the UK. The aim of the project is to determine how many sites should be monitored using static detectors to produce robust population trends for British bat species. Here I present general results arising from the pilot study of the project which took place in S...

Für Fledermäuse ist der Wald von zentraler Bedeutung, da sie darin auf ihren Flügen Nahrung, Quartiere und Schutz finden. Um mehr über das nächtliche Verhalten der Fledermäuse im Wald zu erfahren, kombinierten wir neue Methoden zur automatischen Arterkennung bei Fledermäusen mit detaillierten Messungen der Struktur des Waldes. Dazu haben wir neben...

Ce guide s’adresse avant tout aux producteurs agricoles soucieux de préserver la diversité biologique et les bienfaits qu’elle procure aux cultures. Les propriétaires terriens, les personnes qui cultivent un petit potager et tous ceux qui s’intéressent aux chauves-souris y trouveront des informations leur permettant de s’investir pour leur conserva...

Detailed information about three-dimensional vegetation structure proves increasingly useful for studying species-habitat relationships in forest ecosystems. This particularly applies to species that make extensive use of the three-dimensional habitat space in forests, such as bats. Bats show considerable variation in flight morphology and echoloca...

Acoustic sampling of bats is increasingly used to collect data on species occurrence for monitoring and conservation purposes. However, acoustic sampling schemes are prone to be biased and inefficient if they are not planned and conducted according to scientific standards. Here, we used two open-source software tools (PRESENCE and GENPRES) to devel...