Estructura y diversidad funcional de la comunidad de quirópteros en sitios piemontanos con diferente tipo de uso del suelo

Abstract

The Chiroptera order has a lot of species richness and a great variety of eating habits, highlighting them as important providers of ecosystem functions. Land use change is one of the factors that most affects the composition of bat communities. The piedmont forest is one of the ecosystems with the greatest potential bat richness and also one of the most threatened; it is made up of different land uses. In order to understand the structure and functional diversity of the bat community, piedmont chagras and forests were sampled in the buffer zone of the Colonso Chalupas Biological Reserve. Using mist nets, 224 bats of 33 species of the family Phyllostomidae were captured during 23 nights and 8280 h-m; 14 were restricted to forest, 4 to chagra and 15 were captured in both. The forests have a higher diversity (Shannon-Wiener 2.87 > 2.12). There more animalivorous and frugivorous species in the forest than in the chagra, and there were sensitive species such as Chrotopterus auritus that showed the good state of recovery of the forest, which is essential to include in conservation programs. A lower proportion of pregnant and lactating juveniles and females were found in chagra than in the forest, possibly to avoid predation. It was observed that the chagras conserve only 50% of the species in the forest, so it is important to enrich and improve them for bat conservation and to conduct more studies in other land uses and other sites within the reserve.