According to Winifred Frick, a zoologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz, most studies on the consequences of fires on fauna still present based on the monitoring of bird populations. Bats, who have played a vital role in the ecosystem of insect predators, while they may have on the natural recovery of charred landscape much more pronounced effect. And so Winifred Frick and his team decided to bat populations examined on the spot of recent fires.
Selected areas - the Sierra Nevada, including the national park and forest Seqoia Inyo National Report - has in recent years repeatedly punished devastating fire. For example, in 2002 the element burned over 60,000 hectares of forest and created a diverse mosaic of burnt and partly degraded forests and untouched forests. Location has become an ideal "live" laboratory in which researchers could observe specific developments on the different types of territories affected by varying intensity.
Zoologists coming here year after fires, equipped with "bat-detectors", sensing devices, ultrasonic signals of bats. On the basis of echolocation could then assign the observed specimens to one of the sixteen species living here. It turned out that the glades and burnt, created after fires, open landscape insect individual agents, while visibility is for hunting bats. Therefore, the intermediate and burned habitats bats occurred very frequently.
"It's actually the first study of its kind to focus on the diverse group of flying mammals and their response to fires in the wild," says Frick. As the results show, medium and large fires on bat populations have almost no impact. In addition, for some species opens up new possibilities to expand, and thus it is possible to influence the scientists fires seen as positive. "Bats are simply against fire resistant," says Frick.
The article was published the sixth Third 2013 on the server ScienceDaily.com called "Bats Not Bothered by Forest Fires, Study Finds."
Author: Radomir Dohnal
Source: Ecomonitor.cz