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BATS, ROADS & CONSERVATION. IMPROVING BAT ROADKILL HOTSPOTS IDENTIFICATION AND DETERMINING THE ROAD-EFFECT DISTANCE FOR BAT GUILDS

06 Apr 2018 - Denis Medinas (CIBIO-InBIO) | April 13, 2018 - 15h30 | CIBIO-InBIO’s Auditorium, Campus de Vairão
BATS, ROADS & CONSERVATION. IMPROVING BAT ROADKILL HOTSPOTS IDENTIFICATION AND DETERMINING THE ROAD-EFFECT DISTANCE FOR BAT GUILDS

STUDENT SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION

 

 

Roadkills and road avoidance are the major impact caused by roads on fauna. When combined, these factors can create strong barriers to gene flow, leading to isolation of populations, which decreases landscape functional connectivity and long-term population viability. The spatiotemporal persistence of bat roadkills aggregation (hotspots) are frequently used to identify priority road-areas for mitigation measures. However, understanding the landscape-context and temporal dynamics of these hotspots is challenging. Likewise the most of the research focuses on describing the negative effect of large and high traffic highways on bat activity and diversity, because low to medium traffic roads are often assumed to have negligible impact on wildlife, including bats. During the talk, Denis will present the main results of his PhD project, by identifying the effects of distance to low and medium traffic roads on bat activity, species richness and three bat guilds (short-, mid- and long-range echolocators) and by characterizing the spatiotemporal pattern of bat roadkills aggregation.


Denis Medinas holds a Master in Conservation Biology from the University of Évora. He is presently in the fourth year of the PhD in Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution (BIODIV) from the University of Porto. He is developing a PhD project to assess the role of roads on bats behavior and to assess its effects on long-term population viability of a selected model species (the lesser horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus hipposideros). Denis’s scientific main interests are the ecosystems’ conservation and applied ecology, focusing on the impacts of infrastructures on wildlife and habitat fragmentation.


[Host: Hugo Rebelo, Bat Ecology]


Image credits: Denis Medinas

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