The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) contributed to a manuscript recently published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that documents a comprehensive assessment of North American bats. Brian Reichert (USGS) co-authored the publication that drew upon an expert elicitation to evaluate the conservation status of 153 bat species and their threats in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Researchers used expert assessments to estimate the conservation status, highest impact threats, and recent population trends for these species. Results of the elicitation suggests that 90% of North American bat species had decreasing population trends over the past 15 years and 53% have moderate to very high risk of extinction in the next 15 years. Experts concluded climate change, problematic species (including disease pathogens), agriculture, and energy production pose the greatest threats to North American bats overall, but dominant threats varied by species and country. NABat will lead subsequent assessments of the state of North American bat populations using data-driven, state of the art statistical methods.
To read the article, click here.
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