Fernando Montiel-Reyes
The project's overarching goal is to determine and quantify the role of insectivorous bats in suppressing insect pests of walnut and to provide an economic valuation of this important regulating ecosystem service, as well as an estimate of the negative impacts for human societies of losing that service. I will estimate and compare insectivorous bat richness and activity inside and outside walnut plantations across a year through passive acoustic surveys, determine food resources availability for bats and how they exploit them by seasonality by assembling a genetic library of regional invertebrates and correlating it with guano analysis, also I will establish the economic value of bat ecosystem service of insect suppression to walnut productions and the economic benefits to regional and national scale by applying surveys.
This study looks to determine the ecological and economic importance of insectivorous bats as plausible “natural insecticides” for pecan nut farming in the state of Chihuahua, the main producer in the Mexico. Furthermore, for the first time in the country, I will estimate the monetary value of this regulating service by incorporating this benefit into the pecan nut value chain. Results will increase our understanding of the ecological importance of bats to the Mexican agricultural sector and will help raise awareness on the importance of bats in the region and promote conservation strategies such as the maintenance of bat roosts and the reduction of pesticides use.
There are two main components in this research, the ecological and the economic one. The ecological component includes the evaluation of bat activity through passive monitoring and mist-netting techniques inside and outside the pecan crops as well as diet determination of bats and characterization of arthropod communities across habitats, so I can relate between available resources and bat resource exploiting. The economic component consists in surveys to farmers to determine the additional intakes they have to incur in absence of the suppression service provided by bats.