Improved understanding of the foraging ecology of bats in the face of ongoing habitat loss and modification worldwide is essential to their conservation and maintaining the substantial ecosystem services they provide. It is also fundamental to assessing potential transmission risks of zoonotic pathogens in human-wildlife interfaces. We evaluated the influence of environmental and behavioral variables on the foraging patterns of Pteropus lylei (a reservoir of Nipah virus) in a heterogeneous landscape in Cambodia. We employed an approach based on animal-movement modeling, which comprised a path-segmentation method (hidden Markov model) to identify individual foraging-behavior sequences in GPS data generated by eight P. lylei. We characterized foraging localities, foraging activity, and probability of returning to a given foraging locality over consecutive nights. Generalized linear mixed models were also applied to assess the influence of several variables including proxies for energetic costs and quality of foraging areas. Bats performed few foraging bouts (area-restricted searches) during a given night, mainly in residential areas, and the duration of these decreased during the night. The probability of a bat revisiting a given foraging area within 48 h varied according to the duration previously spent there, its distance to the roost site, and the corresponding habitat type. We interpret these fine-scale patterns in relation to global habitat quality (including food-resource quality and predictability), habitat-familiarity and experience of each individual. Our study provides evidence that heterogeneous human-made environments may promote complex patterns of foraging-behavior and short-term re-visitation in fruit bat species that occur in such landscapes. This highlights the need for similarly detailed studies to understand the processes that maintain biodiversity in these environments and assess the potential for pathogen transmission in human-wildlife interfaces.

中文翻译：

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东南亚果蝠觅食活动和保真度的模式

面对全球范围内不断发生的栖息地丧失和改造，对蝙蝠觅食生态学的进一步了解对于蝙蝠的保护和维持其提供的大量生态系统服务至关重要。这也是评估人与野生动物界面中人畜共患病原体潜在传播风险的基础。我们评估了环境和行为变量对柬埔寨异质景观中Pteropus lylei（Nipah病毒库）的觅食模式的影响。我们采用了一种基于动物运动模型的方法，该方法包括一种路径分割方法（隐马尔可夫模型），以识别由八种P. lylei生成的GPS数据中的个体觅食行为序列。我们对觅食地点，觅食活动，在连续的夜晚返回给定觅食地点的可能性。广义线性混合模型还用于评估几个变量的影响，包括能源成本和觅食地区质量的代理。蝙蝠在给定的夜晚（主要是在居民区）进行了很少的觅食回合（区域受限搜索），并且夜间的持续时间减少了。蝙蝠在48小时内重新进入给定觅食区域的可能性根据先前在那里停留的时间，它与栖息地的距离以及相应的栖息地类型而异。我们解释这些与全球生境质量（包括食物资源质量和可预测性），生境熟悉程度和每个人的经验有关的精细模式。我们的研究提供了证据，表明异类的人造环境可能会促进在此类景观中出现的果蝠物种觅食行为和短期再造的复杂模式。这凸显了需要进行类似的详细研究，以了解在这些环境中维持生物多样性的过程，并评估病原体在人与野生生物之间传播的可能性。