Where large landscape modifications are planned, e.g. for infrastructure or exploitation, ecological impact assessments are required because of their potential effects on environment and species. Methods that make such assessments more standardized, efficient, and reliable are highly desirable. This paper proposes a new connectivity-based habitat model for bats (PREBAT), which could be used as a tool for impact assessments. Using data that was specifically collected for this purpose, the performance of PREBAT is critically analyzed and discussed. For this study, 50 sites within an area of 850 km² in eastern Sweden were inventoried for four nights each using automatic ultrasound recorders to get an empiric measure of bat occurrence that could be compared with PREBAT predictions. The correlation between the predicted values from PREBAT and the observed bat activity (number of recordings) or species richness was tested using generalized linear mixed models. Predicted values of PREBAT are significantly correlated to the number of species that regularly (more than one night) occur at a given site, but not to the total number of species. PREBAT performed also much better at predicting the activity of forest-living species than overall bat activity, which makes PREBAT particularly suitable for predicting conflicts for those species. This study proposes a new habitat model for bats that takes spatial connectivity between habitat patches into account. PREBAT is shown to perform satisfyingly and has the potential to become a useful tool in assessing the ecological impact of large-scale landscape modifications.

中文翻译：

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通过PREBAT测试蝙蝠的丰度和多样性预测，PREBAT是基于连接的食虫蝙蝠栖息地适应性模型

在计划进行大型景观改造的地方（例如，用于基础设施或开发），需要进行生态影响评估，因为它们可能对环境和物种产生潜在影响。非常需要使这种评估更加标准化，有效和可靠的方法。本文提出了一种新的基于连接性的蝙蝠栖息地模型（PREBAT），可以将其用作影响评估的工具。使用专门为此目的收集的数据，对PREBAT的性能进行了严格的分析和讨论。对于本研究，850 km ²内有50个站点在瑞典东部，使用自动超声波记录仪对每个晚上进行了四个晚上的清单盘点，以得到有关蝙蝠发生的经验性度量，可以将其与PREBAT预测进行比较。使用广义线性混合模型测试了PREBAT的预测值与观察到的蝙蝠活性（记录数）或物种丰富度之间的相关性。PREBAT的预测值与在给定位置定期（超过一晚）发生的物种数量显着相关，而不与物种总数相关。与蝙蝠的整体活动相比，PREBAT在预测森林生物物种的活动方面也要好得多，这使PREBAT特别适合于预测这些物种的冲突。这项研究提出了一种新的蝙蝠栖息地模型，该模型考虑了栖息地斑块之间的空间连通性。PREBAT表现令人满意，并且有潜力成为评估大规模景观改造对生态的影响的有用工具。