BATS AND WILDFIRE IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: HOW BAT SPECIES PRESENCE AND RELATIVE ABUNDANCE SHIFTED POST-DIXIE FIRE

Amelia A Tauber; California State University - Sacramento; ameliatauber@gmail.com; Dr. Ronald Coleman, Dr. Anna Doty, Dr. Scott Osborn

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Bats and White-nose Syndrome Project established long-term acoustic monitoring stations in Plumas and Tehama counties in spring 2021. Three months later, the Dixie Fire - California’s largest recorded wildfire - burned through or near all sites, providing a unique opportunity to examine how bat assemblages respond to large-scale disturbance. My thesis analyzes acoustic detections collected before (April-July 2021) and after the fire (April-July 2022) to evaluate shifts in species composition and activity patterns across burned and unburned landscapes. Over two million echolocation files representing 17 species were processed in SonoBat 4.4.5 and verified with a custom EchoClean ruleset. Using both multivariate ordination (CCA) and species-specific generalized linear models (GLMs), I assessed how burn status, elevation, and temperature shaped post-fire activity patterns. The results indicate that most species detected before the fire persisted post-fire, but site-level turnover occurred, with some species appearing or declining locally. CCA showed that temperature and elevation jointly structured post-fire community composition, while GLM outputs highlighted species-level differences in how activity changed in burned versus unburned areas. Together, these findings suggest that environmental gradients and burn severity interact to influence how bat communities reorganize following wildfire. This study contributes to a growing body of work on bat resilience to fire and helps inform management of forested ecosystems under increasing fire frequency.

Ecology and Conservation of Bats II 
Wednesday 5:10 PM
   Student Paper