Effects of ponderosa pine forest restoration on habitat for bats

Abstract. Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests in the southwestern United States, used by 16 species of bats, are managed with thinning and prescribed fire to restore tree densities and fire regimes to conditions that existed prior to Euro-American settlement. Using 2 approaches (roosting and foraging) to categorize forest habitat for bats, we evaluated how restoration treatments may affect habitat use. We hypothesized that more foraging activity would occur in thinned stands because more species are adapted to open forest, but that more roosts would occur in unthinned stands where snags were unaffected by mechanical treatments and prescribed fire. During the summers of 2006 and 2007, we used acoustic detectors to record call rates of bats as a measure of activity level and compared activity levels among stands that had undergone 3 thinning treatments (light, moderate, and heavy, with 245, 172, or 142 trees per hectare postthinning, respectively) and an unthinned stand as a control (1201 trees per hec...