Habitat and climate drivers of bat populations and assemblages across the East European Plain
The East European Plain serves as a core breeding area for European migratory bats. However, very little is known about bat biogeography and distribution patterns in this region. This project will fill a gap about bat summer habitat preferences in a vast area of the East European Plain.
| Duration: | 12/2023 -06/2025 |
| Third-party funded: | yes |
| Involved Department(s): | Dept Ecological Dynamics |
| Leibniz-IZW Project Leader(s): | Viktoriia Radchuk |
| Leibniz-IZW Project Team: | Anton Vlaschenko, Viktoriia Radchuk (all: Dept. Ecological Dynamics) |
| Consortium Partner(s): | Kseniia Kravchenko, Alona Prylutska |
| Current Funding Organisation: | MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship |
|
Research Foci: |
Understanding the environmental context |
The East European Plain serves as a core breeding area for European migratory bats and thus plays a global role for persistence of these species. However, the summer bat assemblages of Eastern Europe remained unstudied at the systemic level and very little is known about bat biogeography and distribution patterns in Eastern Europe. This project will fill a gap about bat summer habitat preferences in a vast area of the East European Plain.
The research team led by Dr. Anton Vlaschchenko launched a standardized monitoring scheme (in terms of season, operating protocol and sampling effort) in 2007-2024 in several areas of Eastern Europe. Using this methodology, the bat distribution and compositional data was collected at the border between the Eastern European Forest Steppe and Pontic Steppe ecoregions, in the Central European Mixed Forests, Carpathian Montane Forests and Sarmatic Mixed Forests up to the border with Taiga.
This rich and unique dataset will be used in this project to assess how summer bat assemblages are shaped by land cover and climate across the vast area of the East European Plain. Further, we will also investigate species-specific habitat preferences of bats and the effects of ecoregion’s climatic features and land cover on the abundance indices of the more common bat species. The findings of this research are expected to benefit future conservation practices on the pan-European scale.
This research is funded by MSCA4Ukraine Fellowship.
Selected Publications
Anton Vlaschenko, Kseniia Kravchenko, Yehor Yatsiuk, Vitalii Hukov, Stephanie Kramer-Schadt, Viktoriia Radchuk (2022): Bat Assemblages Are Shaped by Land Cover Types and Forest Age: A Case Study from Eastern Ukraine. FORESTS, 13(10): 1732.
Vlaschenko A., Yatsiuk Ye., Hukov V., Prylutska A., Straka T., Kravchenko K. (2021): Urban forest preserves local bat species diversity, but not forest-dweller specialists – renewed study 65 years later (Kharkiv city, Ukraine). Mammal Research. v.66 no.4 pp. 615-626.
Vlaschenko A., Kravchenko K., Prylutska A., Ivancheva E., Sitnikova E., Mishin A. (2016). Structure of summer bat assemblages in forest of European Russia. Turk J Zool., 40: 876-893.