Science News
Luring bats to jump-start tropical reforestation
Providing artificial roosts for bats could pave the way to reseeding devastated forests, researchers say.
Every year, millions of hectares of tropical forest are converted to pastures and plantations, then eventually abandoned when the soils become depleted. Practical strategies for restoring the former forests have been virtually nonexistent, but a study reported online in Conservation Biology (DOI 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.00925.x) on April 28 suggests that rolling out a welcome mat for seed-spreading bats could significantly speed up reforestation.
Often, a lack of new seeds is the biggest obstacle to natural forest regeneration in the tropics, research shows. Bats pollinate an estimated 1000 neotropical plant species and are champion dispersers of seeds via their feces. But bats need roosts, which are few and far between on logged-out lands. To investigate the effects of providing this missing habitat link, Detlev Kelm of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Germany) and his colleagues fabricated boxes from sawdust and concrete that mimicked the hollow tree trunks that bats naturally roost in. They installed 45 imitation roosts in two different habitats in Costa Rica: in continuous forest within the La Selva Biological Station and on agricultural land up to several kilometers away. They also set up traps to collect "seed rain" from bats defecating in flight.
After monitoring the study sites from 2000 to 2006, the researchers discovered that 10 different species of bats were quick to take advantage of the new lodgings. They permanently colonized all the artificial roosts, usually within weeks of installation, Kelm reports. The bats' droppings contained seeds of more than 60 plant species and, notably, in the nonforested sites most seeds were from pioneer varieties critical to forest restoration. The findings show that artificial roosts could act as nuclei for forest recovery and help link fragmented landscapes, he says. "The species attracted to the roosts are common and widely distributed, so this method could likely work in many regions," he adds.
Tropical ecologist William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama) says the study clearly demonstrates that artificial roosts can attract bats to degraded lands. "Given bats' highly important role as seed distributors, it's encouraging that a variety of species are using these roosts," he adds.
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