IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v12y2020i5p1959-d328291.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Investigating Bat Activity in Various Agricultural Landscapes in Northeastern United States

Author

Listed:
  • Katherine Harms

    (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA)

  • Emmanuel Omondi

    (Research Department, Rodale Institute, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA)

  • Atanu Mukherjee

    (Research Department, Rodale Institute, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA)

Abstract

Bats are estimated to provide between $3.7 and $53 billion annually in ecosystem services in the U.S.A. Determining how bats use land for foraging is important in planning agricultural landscapes to increase their presence and role in insect pest control. A research project was established in 2016 and 2017 to determine bat populations and activity differences between different land use management systems. Bat activity was monitored in 10 conventionally and organically managed systems in the presence of, and at a distance from the tree line. Two acoustic monitoring devices were used to record ultrasonic echolocation calls of bats. Organic systems without tree line had 67% and 45% greater bat passes than conventional systems without tree line as detected by the two devices. However, the conventional system with tree line had 61% and 59% greater bat passes than organic systems, attributed to known roosting sites in the area. Mean bat passes of 73.4 and 30 were recorded respectively at 15 m and 46 m from the tree line, suggesting that bats prefer to forage near tree lines likely to have greater access to roosting, food security, and habitation. This study confirms the importance of tree lines in impacting bat activity in conformity with past studies that reported similar results.

Suggested Citation

  • Katherine Harms & Emmanuel Omondi & Atanu Mukherjee, 2020. "Investigating Bat Activity in Various Agricultural Landscapes in Northeastern United States," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(5), pages 1-10, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:5:p:1959-:d:328291
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/1959/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/1959/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lévesque, Ann & Kermagoret, Charlène & Poder, Thomas G. & L'Ecuyer-Sauvageau, Chloé & He, Jie & Sauvé, Sébastien & Dupras, Jérôme, 2021. "Financing on-farm ecosystem services in southern Quebec, Canada: A public call for pesticides reduction," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 184(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:5:p:1959-:d:328291. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.