However, 25% of bats worldwide are classed as ‘of conservation concern’, with a further 21% classified as ‘near threatened’. Bats are pivotal to supporting global biodiversity they are the primary consumers of nocturnal insects, disperse nutrients across landscapes, and are excellent bioindicators of an ecosystem’s health. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.īats (order Chiroptera) are the second largest group of mammals. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: Robin Allaby runs the service EcoWarwicker Ecological Forensics, based within Warwick University that primarily sequences bat guano for the purposes of species identification. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.įunding: RW received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (grant number 1228377, ). Received: OctoAccepted: MaPublished: April 9, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Ware et al. PLoS ONE 15(4):Įditor: Lyi Mingyang, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research Chinese Academy of Sciences, CHINA This enables the identification of the most important prey taxa within a local environment a crucial step for informing conservation strategies.Ĭitation: Ware RL, Garrod B, Macdonald H, Allaby RG (2020) Guano morphology has the potential to inform conservation strategies in British bats. In general, guano morphology seems more correlated to diet than species. It was found that guano morphology overlapped too much to make predictions on the species of bat which deposited the guano, however, in some cases, it could be used to indicate the dietary guild to which the bat belonged. These data were coupled with diet data obtained by an extensive literature review. Guano from 16 bat species sampled from across Great Britain were analysed to determine various morphological metrics. In this study we aim to investigate the link between bat guano morphology and diet, specifically looking at the ability to predict 1) species, 2) dietary guild, and 3) bat size, using guano morphology alone. Bats are primary consumers of nocturnal insects, disperse nutrients across landscapes, and are excellent bioindicators of an ecosystem’s health, however four of the seventeen Great British species are listed as declining.
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