Summer Roost Site Suitability Analyses of Four North American Bat Species in the Eastern United States

This data release contains the spatial raster outputs from analyses of summer roost site habitat for each of 4 species considered under the United States Forest Service proposed Bat Conservation Strategy (Myotis lucifugus, MYLU; Myotis septentrionalis, MYSE; Myotis sodalis, MYSO; and Perimyotis subflavus, PESU). The included raster data represent the mean suitability for summer roosting habitat for each of the four species (expressed as a numerical value from 0 to 1), the prediction interval (difference between the 5th and 95th confidence intervals), as well as the environmental covariates used to model habitat. All raster data are produced at a spatial resolution of 250 m per pixel. Summer roost site suitability layers were produced using a presence-background modeling approach with the Maxent algorithm. Presence-background modeling compares environmental conditions at locations where a species has been observed (in this case occupied summer roosting sites) to environmental conditions across a study area (background). Background environmental conditions were represented with a suite of raster data hypothesized to influence the suitability for roosting sites. These raster data represented average conditions between the years 2000 and 2020 across the continental United States. Occupied sites were identified from two data sources: U.S. Forest Service, and the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) spanning the years 2000 to 2020. While the observations from NABat are sampled from the continental United States, the U.S. Forest Service observations were obtained only for Regions 8 and 9 in the eastern United States.