Title: Winter Roost Selection of Lasiurine Tree Bats in a Pyric Landscape
Description: Day-roost selection by tree bats during winter and their response to dormant season fires is poorly known throughout much of the southeastern United States.  In the winter of 2019, we mist-netted and affixed radio-transmitters to 16 Lasiurine bats, primarily Seminole bats (Lasiurus seminolus) at Camp Blanding Joint Training Center in northern Florida.  We then located day-roost sites to generally describe roost attributes.   For five Seminole bats, one eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis), and one hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus), we applied prescribed burns in the roost area to observe bat response.  Generally, Seminole bats selected day-roosts in mesic forest stands with high mean fire return intervals.  At the roost tree scale , Seminole day-roosts tended to be larger, taller and in higher canopy dominance classes than surrounding trees.  Seminole bats day-roosted in longleaf (Pinus palustris), slash (Pinus elliotii) and loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) more than expected based on availability, whereas sweetbay (Magnolia virginiana), water oak (Quercus nigra) and turkey oak (Quercus laevis), were roosted in less than expected based on availability.  Of the seven roosts subjected to prescribed burns, only one male Seminole bat and one male eastern red bat evacuated the day-roost during or after burning.  In both cases, these bats had day-roosted at heights lower and in trees smaller than the majority of other day-roosts observed during our study.  Although fires historically were predominantly growing season, they now occur in the dormant season in this part of the Coastal Plain, our results possibly suggest Seminole bats choose winter day-roosts that both maximize solar exposure and minimize risks associated with fire.  Nonetheless, at least for Seminole bats, because selected day-roosts largely were fire-dependent or tolerant species, application of fire does need to periodically occur to promote recruitment and retention of these tree species.
	
Authors: William Ford, Marcelo Jorge
	
Keywords: Fish and Wildlife Conservation, longleaf pine ecosystem, prescribed fire, winter season, Bats, Seminole bat, roost site selection
	
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Publisher: University Libraries, Virginia Tech

	
Items in this dataset:

Title: Resource Selection_Habitat.csv
Description: Data used in Winter Roost Selection of Lasiurine Tree Bats in a Pyric Landscape. Data includes bat roost location (use =1) and random points (use =0), and associated covariates (mfri = Mean Fire Return Interval, mesic = whether it’s considered mesic or xeric, wetbin = numeric representation of mesic) to run a GLM with use as response variable.
	
Authors: wmford@vt.edu , mjorge@vt.edu
	
Resource type: Tabular Data
	
License: CC BY 3.0 US
	
Keywords: Bats
	
Subject: Fish and Wildlife Conservation
	
Language: 
	
Location: 
	
Date Uploaded: 2020-10-12

Title: BLANDING_FINAL_Roosts.csv
Description: Data used in Winter Roost Selection of Lasiurine Tree Bats in a Pyric Landscape. Data includes bat roost characteristics for resource selection function between the roost tree and four surrounding trees, one from each quadrant created by the four cardinal directions. Column definitions: WHO = who collected data with VT being employees of virginia tech and FL being employees of Florida Fish and wildlife conservation commission, Bat = bat species abbreviated scientific names, freq = frequency associated with radio transmitter, Tree ID= unique tree identification number with bat frequency, Reuse= days in which the roost was reused by the same bat. Burnday = the day in which the roost was burned. Species= abbreviated scientific names of the tree species. DBH= diameter at breast height, height= height of tree, canopy = the canopy cover percentage, class= class of tree (i.e., 1 = suppressed, 2 = intermediate, 3 = codominant, 4 = dominant), decay = decay class  (i.e.,1 = live, 2 = declining, 3 = recent dead, 4 = loose bark, 5 = no bark, 6 = broken top, 7 = broken bole), Basal_Ft = the basal area of trees in the area. Q = the quadrant trees (i.e 1-4) with Qdist denoting the distance from the quadrant tree to the roost tree and all the other covariates being the same as previously described.
	
Authors: wmford@vt.edu , mjorge@vt.edu
	
Resource type: Tabular Data
	
License: CC BY 3.0 US
	
Keywords: Bats
	
Subject: Fish and Wildlife Conservation
	
Language: 
	
Location: 
	
Date Uploaded: 2020-10-12