Effects of land‐use changes on Brazilian bats: a review of current knowledge

One third of Brazil has been converted to human‐modified lands, emphasising the need to understand biodiversity’s responses to land‐use changes. To address this issue, we reviewed 53 studies on the effects of land‐use changes on bats in the country from 1990 to 2018. Bats were chosen because they contribute towards numerous ecosystem services, including seed dispersal and insect control. For each study, we obtained data on the biome where fieldwork was conducted, participating institutes, sampling method, sampling effort, main results and academic impact. Spatial scales of studies were divided into ‘local’, ‘fragment’, ‘landscape’ or ‘metapopulation’. Our results indicate an increasing interest in bats and land‐use changes in Brazil over time; however, no trend in academic impact factor was found. Studies carried out in the Atlantic Forest were the most common, appearing earlier in the literature, but studies in Amazonia, often from long‐term research, had larger sampling efforts, were published in higher impact factor journals and received more citations. We identified several gaps in the literature: 1) lack of acoustic surveys complementing mist‐netting, 2) telemetry studies were rare, 3) underrepresentation of the Caatinga biome, along with Pantanal and Grasslands (= Pampa), and 4) fewer studies using the landscape and fragment scale than local studies. We suggest that future research should focus on filling those gaps. Bat diversity is often found to be positively related to forest cover, fragment size and natural vegetation. Logging and agroforestry seem to have the lesser impact on bats compared to agriculture and urbanisation. Only haematophagous bats are benefited by pastures. We found guild‐specific responses to land‐use changes. Haematophagous batsseem to be the least impacted by them compared to other guilds, while animalivorous bats are particularly impacted by habitat fragmentation. Facing continuous deforestation, we can expect that bat diversity in Brazil will possibly reduce. Conservation efforts should focus on species shown to be sensitive to land‐use changes, especially where higher deforestation rates are expected. RESUMO EM PORTUGUÊS Um terço do Brasil foi convertido em áreas antropizadas, enfatizando a necessidade de se entender as respostas da biodiversidade às mudanças no uso do solo. Para abordar esse problema, nós revisamos 53 estudos sobre os efeitos das mudanças no uso do solo em morcegos no país, publicados de 1990 até 2018. Mo