![]() ![]() ![]() In Europe, AES which are primarily designed to support birds, invertebrates, and plants bring varied benefits for microbats. To date, there is a lack of consensus as to how to best manage for bats in agricultural environments. Depending on reproductive condition, a single microbat consumes 40–100% of its own body weight in insects per night. They also exert top-down natural control of arthropod pests that have considerable impacts on crop yield. For example, microbats are highly mobile, are able to exploit patchily-distributed resources and retained features in the landscape, and often constitute a large component of the mammalian fauna in agricultural environments. However, most existing work has focused on birds, and other, more cryptic groups may respond differently to AES. Because all species do not necessarily benefit from such ‘wildlife-friendly farming’ measures, some propose that investments could be better spent establishing separate conservation reserves, an approach known as ‘land-sparing’. To mitigate negative effects associated with these, Agri-Environment Schemes (AES) have been established in many regions of the world, which offer farmers financial incentives to plant and protect vegetation, use fewer agrochemicals, or employ alternative grazing regimes. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īgricultural intensification and associated habitat fragmentation are key threatening processes for wildlife. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: Financial support was provided by a “Science Grant” from The Paddy Pallin Foundation in partnership with the Royal Zoological Society of NSW ( ), a WildCountry Science Council student top-up ( ), the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education Australian Postgraduate Award to PL ( ), and a CSIRO student top-up scholarship to PL ( ). Received: JAccepted: SeptemPublished: November 14, 2012Ĭopyright: © 2012 Lentini et al. The “wildlife friendly farming” vs “land sparing” debate has so far primarily focussed on birds, but here we have found evidence that the integration of both approaches could particularly benefit bats.Ĭitation: Lentini PE, Gibbons P, Fischer J, Law B, Hanspach J, Martin TG (2012) Bats in a Farming Landscape Benefit from Linear Remnants and Unimproved Pastures. In contrast, sealed roads may act as a deterrent. ![]() We conclude that the juxtaposition of linear remnants of intact vegetation and scattered trees in fields, coupled with less-intensive land uses such as unimproved pastures will benefit bat communities in agricultural landscapes, and should be incorporated into agri-environment schemes. Fields of unimproved native pastures, with more retained scattered trees and associated hollows and logs, supported the greatest bat species richness and activity. Wider linear remnants with intact native vegetation supported more bat species, as did those adjacent to unsealed, as opposed to sealed roads. We trapped a mean 87.6 g (☑7.6 g SE) of arthropods per night, but found no differences in biomass between land uses. The linear remnants supported higher bat activity than the fields, but species richness and feeding activity did not significantly differ. 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. Nocturnal arthropods were simultaneously trapped using black-light traps. 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. We investigated the relationship between microbats and measures commonly incorporated into agri-environment schemes, to derive management recommendations for their ongoing conservation. Microbats are often overlooked in this process, yet persist in agricultural landscapes and exert top-down control of crop pests. Schemes designed to make farming landscapes less hostile to wildlife have been questioned because target taxa do not always respond in the expected manner.
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