Africa's bats could survive climate change—if they can find somewhere to live

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Climate change and changes in the way land is used are the two biggest threats to wildlife because they change the environment in which animals survive and thrive. Knowing how species respond to these pressures is central to planning conservation actions.

A number of studies have modeled how climate change will affect vertebrate distributions. But little is known about bats from tropical and subtropical regions, especially in Africa. Bats are particularly sensitive to changes to their environment because of their slow reproductive rates, dependence on stable roosts and sensitivity to climatic extremes that shape insect availability—their main source of food.

They therefore need both suitable foraging landscapes and the availability of caves for roosting. Research has been done on how bats will be affected by the effects of climate change such as rising temperatures. What has been overlooked is the fact that cave-dependent bats can't survive in climatically suitable areas without access to suitable roosts.

So even if a future landscape has the right temperature and rainfall, it may be of little use to a bat if there is nowhere suitable to roost. That led us to a simple question: What happens when the places with the right climate aren't the places with caves? Having studied bats since 2017, I have spent much of my research career investigating their ecology and dependence on particular habitats.

This experience led me to question where climate change might push wildlife. I wanted to understand whether Africa's cave-dwelling bats would actually be able to find somewhere to live as the climate changes. My co-author Mark Keith and I set out to answer this by building a model that brought together future climate conditions and the availability of caves and rocky roosting habitat across sub-Saharan Africa.

We used cave-dwelling long-fingered bats called Miniopteridae as our study group to explore how these two essential pieces of the puzzle might overlap in the future. The study is published in the journal Austral Ecology. Long-fingered bats are found widely across Africa and depend heavily on caves for shelter.