Body size information in large-scale acoustic bat databases ...
Background Citizen monitoring programs using acoustic data have been useful for detecting population and community patterns. However, they have rarely been used to study broad scale patterns of species traits. We assessed the potential of acoustic data to detect broad scale patterns in body size. We...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
PeerJ, Ltd
2018
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.7892/boris.119906 https://boris.unibe.ch/119906/ |
| Summary: | Background Citizen monitoring programs using acoustic data have been useful for detecting population and community patterns. However, they have rarely been used to study broad scale patterns of species traits. We assessed the potential of acoustic data to detect broad scale patterns in body size. We compared geographical patterns in body size with acoustic signals in the bat species Pipistrellus pipistrellus. Given the correlation between body size and acoustic characteristics, we expected to see similar results when analyzing the relationships of body size and acoustic signals with climatic variables. Methods We assessed body size using forearm length measurements of 1,359 bats, captured by mist nets in France. For acoustic analyses, we used an extensive dataset collected through the French citizen bat survey. We isolated each bat echolocation call (n = 4,783) and performed automatic measures of signals, including the frequency of the flattest part of the calls (characteristic frequency). We then examined ... |
|---|