Land use status in the distribution of five species of bats of the Family Emballonuridae in Honduras, Central America

Abstract

Forests in Central America have suffered land use changes in the past decades, as well as a decrease in its size. The effects of this reduction, added to these changes, could represent a threat for bat diversity since these animals specialize in hunting or foraging in specific environments. Since there is scarce knowledge of the current situation or conservation status of bats in Honduras, specially of insectivorous bats, we assessed potential threats of land use change and the consequent reduction of natural areas regarding five species of bats belonging to the Emballonuridae family. We also quantified protected areas where Emballonuridae bats were located and defined conservation gaps for each species. To do this, we used species distribution maps and land use layers of 2001 and 2009, where we could visualize land use change tendency between both periods. Conservation gaps were defined using protected areas and micro-watersheds layers declared until 2015, which were overlapped with the distribution of the five bats species. The results of the analysis of land use change show a predominance of productive systems in the distribution of the different bat species, therefore land use change effect is potentially high. Also, species occurrence is low under protected areas. Most of the species confront a high level of land use change and low levels of protection, especially those that inhabit dry forest and pine forest.