Bats depend on open bodies of water such as small ponds and lakes for foraging and drinking.
Bats depend on open bodies of water such as small ponds and lakes for foraging and drinking. Access to water is particularly important for survival in the increasingly hot and dry summers caused by climate change, the time when female bats are pregnant and rear their young. A scientific team from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) has now shown that access to drinking sites is hampered by wind turbines in agricultural landscapes: Many bat species avoid the turbines and water bodies located close to the turbines for several kilometres. These results have been published in the scientific journal “Biological Conservation”.
In order to counteract climate change, many countries are investing in the expansion of wind energy production in order to reduce greenhouse gases such as CO2 through renewable electricity. However, the expansion of wind power production may also have negative consequences for wildlife and their habitats. This can potentially lead to some wildlife species being less able to cope with global warming. Prof Dr Christian Voigt and Dr Carolin Scholz from the Leibniz-IZW and Hannah Klein from the University of Potsdam showed in a scientific investigation of the acoustic activity of bats in agricultural landscapes that many bat species are displaced by wind turbines near smaller bodies of water. They analysed the spatial behaviour of bats belonging to the three functional guilds of open space foraging bats (that hunt above fields or the canopy of forests), narrow space foraging bats (that hunt in dense vegetations, for example below the forest canopy) and edge space foraging bats (that are specialised in foraging in transition zones such as forest edges). “We were able to clearly recognise that those bats which specialized to forage in the open space and in dense vegetation avoided water bodies when wind turbines were located near them”, says Voigt. “Only species of the guild of edge space foraging bats are apparently not driven away from the water sites by the wind turbines.”
Read more at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW)
Image: Small water bodies and wind turbines in the agricultural landscape (Credit: Photo by Jon A. Juarez/Leibniz-IZW)
