Do you have a sense of the typical foraging range for these bats? I am wondering if the bats (in each species) constitute in your study area a single population, or a metapopulation? I know some fruit bats forage very widely.

Cool project! For how long of a time period are you measuring landscape change?

Thanks Leslie! As for the social data collection I have questions about land use and migration history that go back until the person settled there which in most cases is 20 yrs (around 1980) but this obviously varies quite a bit depending on the household and when they moved to the frontier. For the ecological data, more with the work of Adina and Ricardo on functional plant traits, forest regeneration and ecosystem properties they are working on plots where there is 20+ years of previous data collection and are adding to those data bases through their data collection. As a team we are also analyzing land use change at a regional level from 1986- 2011 via remotely sensed images so we will be able to talk about change over that time period. Thanks for the question.
Irene

Brian,
I had my teammate Kate respond to this one as she is the wildlife ecologist.
Yes, some radiotelemetry work has been done with both these species of bats, showing that the average roost-to-forage area for A.jamaicensis is 8km (Morrison 1978) and for C.castanea is 87m (Bonnacarso et al. 2006). So it is likely that the A.jamaicensis in each of the three study areas constitute a single population but the C.castanea constitute a metapopulation; the large difference in home range is why we chose these two species. The hypothesis we are testing for the landscape genetic work asks whether in a fragmented landscape A.jamaicensis is more capable of traveling between isolated forest patches than C.castanea, and if so, what are the implications for gene flow of the associated plant species that each bat species disperses.
Thanks for the question!