Open Collections

Aguirre, Aaron

University of British Columbia

While urbanization is driving overall biodiversity loss, some bat species, like the endangered Little Brown Myotis (Myotis lucifugus), utilize anthropogenic structures for roosting and urban parks for foraging. However, identifying critical habitat for urban bat species remains challenging due to limited information on how urban landscape features influence bat activity. I conducted acoustic sampling across a 341 km² area of the Vancouver metropolitan area in British Columbia to answer three questions. (a) How does size of parks and distance from parks relate to bat activity? (b) How do urban landscape features relate to bat activity? And, (c) How do these relationships differ between bats of two frequency guilds: “high-frequency” (> 35 kHz) and “low-frequency” (< 35 kHz)? I recorded over 150,000 bat passes in 2022 and 2023 at 21 parks and their surrounding landscapes. I analysed bat activity in relation to park size, distance from the park, area of forest cover, area of water, and forest edge density. Area of forest cover and area of water were both positively associated with bat activity for both guilds while forest edge density had no significant relationship to bat activity. Park size had little relationship to bat activity across both guilds and distance from park was only negatively associated with activity for low-frequency bat activity. While parks may provide habitat islands for some bat species, my results provide an opportunity to target urban bat management in a broader landscape context that can contribute to regional sustainability initiatives while also promoting human-wildlife coexistence in urban spaces.

Text

2025-03-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90503

Resources, Environment and Sustainability

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/