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Size does matter: Passive sampling in urban parks of a regional bat assemblage

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Abstract

We studied the occurrence of bats in urban parks in the city of Madrid (Spain), and the resulting patterns were compared with bat occurrence in the surrounding region. In this way, we addressed if the presence of individual species in the study parks was positively related to their regional occurrence and the way some geographical and environmental traits affected bat richness and composition in urban parks. We analysed urban parks varying in area, structure and distance to the edge of the town. During two years, bats occurring in parks were sampled using ultrasound detectors. A similar sampling method was carried out for four years in the countryside around the city to detect the regional pool of species. The results show that the occurrence of individual species in urban parks was a reduced sample of the regional pool of species and that there was a positive relationship between the occurrence of species in urban parks and the surrounding countryside. This pattern suggests that the more distributed bats at a regional scale were the most frequent ones in parks within the urban matrix. Park area was the main determinant of bat richness. In addition, bat richness distribution reported a nested pattern of species loss as park area decreased. This suggests that bat occurrence in the study parks can be interpreted as the results of a passive sampling of individual species occurring at the regional scale, and that park size was the main determinant of the species occurrence. We conclude that more proactive approaches to bat conservation could be carried out in order to improve the presence of some rare species in urban parks.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by Elena Tena’s contract from the Council for Culture, Education and Sport in the Autonomous Community of Madrid and European Social Fund. We would like to thank all volunteers who helped us with night surveying for bats, especially to Javier Pineda, Cristina Gutiérrez del Álamo, Carmen Soria, Santiago Perea and Carmen Román. We are also grateful to Javier Seoane for helping with the nestedness analysis, to Stewart Finlayson and Tyson Lee Holmes for their support in the review of English, to Octavio Jiménez- Robles for his wise advice, and to the two reviewers that considerably improved an early version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Biodiversidad, Ecología y Evolución, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, E-28040, Madrid, Spain

    Elena Tena, Guillermo Fandos, Óscar de Paz, Roberto de la Peña & José Luis Tellería

  2. Departamento de Ciencias de la Vida, Facultad de Biología, Ciencias Ambientales y Química, Universidad de Alcalá, E-28801, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Óscar de Paz

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  1. Elena Tena
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  2. Guillermo Fandos
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  3. Óscar de Paz
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  5. José Luis Tellería
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Correspondence to Elena Tena.

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Tena, E., Fandos, G., de Paz, Ó. et al. Size does matter: Passive sampling in urban parks of a regional bat assemblage. Urban Ecosyst 23, 227–234 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-019-00913-2

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