Spatial responses of long-eared bats Plecotus auritus to forestry practices: Implications for forest management in protected areas

Landscape management is a key tool for wildlife conservation. This is especially important in protected areas, where conservation, local resource harvesting such as timber harvesting, and public accessibility are potentially conflicting needs that eventually influence wildlife ecology and behaviour. We studied the spatial behaviour of a forest specialist, the brown long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus), and tested how this species copes with: i) habitat structure shaped by forest management practices (past coppice, high forest and conifer plantations), and ii) the occurrence of gaps within the forest matrix opened by people to make space for pastures and hiking trails. We radio-tagged 17 bats for 3 consecutive nights each, to track their movements in a beech-dominated forest landscape in central Italy, and assessed their spatial behaviour in relation to the landscape by adopting two different approaches. First, we applied habitat selection analyses to test whether specific land use classes were disproportionately used by bats over land class availability within the landscape. Second, we related individual-based foraging and commuting locations to landscape structure, predicting activity-specific probabilities in response to land use composition and spatial patterning. Brown long-eared bats most preferred high forest stands, whereas all other land classes were least preferred such as coppice, conifer stands, and pastures. Predictive models indicate that commuting and foraging, besides being both more likely to occur within high forest, were differently affected by landscape features. Commuting long-eared bats flew along and closer to trails and open areas compared to random sites, while such habitat features were barely used for foraging. On such bases, due to the great importance of high forest, we highlight that long time may be needed to functionally convert coppice into high forest, and that previous forest management may have long-lasting effects on forest-specialist taxa. Similarly, the use of non-native conifers, once favoured for their high timber productivity, should be avoided within protected areas aiming at conserving forest bats. Trails and clearings might also be planned strategically to exploit their potential role of ecological corridor between core forest areas and favour bat commuting.