Decoupling the effects of water quality and urbanization on bats

Authors Han Li and Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell employ the North American Bat Monitoring Program mobile acoustic transect protocol to study the effects of urbanization versus water quality degradation on bats at the landscape scale. By decoupling these two covariates, the authors found that bats responded to water quality degradation and urbanization independently at the landscape scale, with further variation depending on the species. Their findings suggest that bats can serve as useful bioindicators for both urbanization and water quality degradation. The full paper was published in the Journal of Ecology and Evolution and can be found here.

Li, H., M. Kalcounis-Rueppell. 2017. Separating the effects of water quality and urbanization on temperate insectivorous bats at the landscape scale. Ecology and Evolution. 8(1): 667-678.