Dear colleagues,
I am interested in distribution data of maternity and hibernation colonies for Nyctalus noctula, Vespertilio murinus and Pipistrellus nathusii, from all over Europe. My intention is to model areas of high suitability using SDMs and to try and identify theoretical least cost paths. Can you recommend me some publications - I am particularly interested in raw data on the matter at hand.
GBIF is not so interesting, even if you filter your data by date, you cannot know for sure what were the animals doing in the area.
Much obliged!
Dragos
Not sure how to gather this kind of data, maybe better via mailing-lists of chiropterologists?
by the way, I'm afraid that you cannot predict least-cost paths for migration by using roost locations, as environmental correlates of roost sites may strongly differ from commuting/migration ones
How will you know that the locations identified as having the highest suitability are the 'best' for that bats - do you mean that is where you assume that their population growth is highest? or might that be where their relationship with man makes them most detectable? - which will of course differ enormously in different countries (type of building method, extent of natural roosts, activity of bat stakeholders, quality of bat recording schemes)
Yes, this is a big challenge, not sure if it will work out for the connectivity model either. The point is to identify the environmental correlates for maternity and for hibernation areas, not stop over points. At a general level (European level) patterns will emerge, which can be identified using SDMs. It should also have some overlap, for example Denmark for V. murinus.
The second question is a good one, that will just have to be fixed by the sampling method. It is quite known that you will always have a larger number of points close to the observers main areas of interest (such as their home or their university). There are compensation measures for this approach, which will reduce the errors. We do not search for abundances, but just for the presence of the event, the possibility that a hibernation or a maternity colony can form in the given area.
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