Effect of water management on bat activity in rice paddies
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ARTICLE
Effect of water management on bat activity in rice paddies Roberto Toffoli1 · Marco Rughetti1 Received: 13 November 2019 / Revised: 2 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 June 2020 © The International Society of Paddy and Water Environment Engineering 2020
Abstract Rice fields may represent an important habitat for biodiversity conservation. Unfortunately, rice farming intensification reduced the value of rice crops as a surrogate habitat for many species. Currently, major threats for wildlife in rice fields derive from cultivation techniques in dry soils. In this paper, we aim to describe the effect of water management techniques in rice paddies on the flight and feeding activity of bats. We investigated the habitat use of 14 bat taxa in the rice paddies of northwest Italy and tested for a difference in the number of echolocation calls recorded in flooded vs non-flooded and organic vs conventional rice paddies. We observed no significant differences among flooded and non-flooded fields in conventional farms, whereas in organic farms bat activity was strongly affected by water management techniques with a large decrease in passes and feeding buzzes when rice paddies were dry. A dry seeding-based rice cultivation may nullify the positive effects of environmentally friendly management practices that are often able to restore suitable foraging sites for bats. In addition, the negative effects of dry rice paddies appeared to be more pronounced shortly after bats emerged from hibernation, when energy demand for body mass growth and offspring gestation is higher. The recent spread of dry seeding may therefore threaten the suitability of rice fields as a foraging habitat for bats. As already observed for other taxonomic groups, changes in water management strategies may compromise bat conservation in rice paddies, requiring the adoption of alternative rice cultivation practices. Keywords Chiroptera · Rice field · Organic farm · Conventional farm · Water management · Northern Italy
Introduction Rice fields are man-managed temporary aquatic ecosystems that are traditionally flooded during summer and dried during winter months. Rice fields represent about 15% of the world’s wetlands today (Lawler 2001). In the scientific literature, there is a large amount of evidence that traditional management of rice fields previously made them a suitable habitat for birds (Fasola and Ruìz 1996; Czech and Parsons 2002), mammals (Puig-Montserrat et al. 2015; Toffoli and Rughetti 2017), amphibians (Duré et al. 2008), macroinvertebrates (Lupi et al. 2013), and more generally for species linked to wetlands (Lawler 2001; Bambaradeniya et al. * Roberto Toffoli [email protected] Marco Rughetti [email protected] 1
CHIROSPHERA Associazione per lo studio e la tutela dei chirotteri e l’ambiente, Via Tetti Barbiere 11, 10026 Santena, TO, Italy
2004). These artificial aquatic ecosystems are dynamic and rapidly changing (Ferrari et al. 1984; Rossi et al. 1974) and have high biological diversity (Bogliani 2008; Washitani 2007). Additionally,
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