Fruit and nectar-eating bats live in close contact to villagers in Cóndor.

The aim of this second RSG project is to conserve bats in areas potentially important for bat populations. The project will conduct a series of bat surveys, threat assessments and rural educational workshops at 10 important areas for bat conservation in Bolivia that have never been previously studied. The areas selected are either sites that represent high priority sites for bats, such as roosts and nurseries, or sites known (or suspected) to have very high bat diversity. At each area we will conduct a comprehensive survey of the bat diversity using different capture methods and acoustic survey techniques.

This will be carried out in caves (if present) and the surrounding habitats. A threat assessment will be conducted at each site through observations and interviews with villagers. At each site we will conduct an educational workshop focusing on the bat community found in the survey, particularly in the specific threats observed. The workshops will be aimed at working against the perception that “all bats are bad” and demonstrating the importance of bats in forest regeneration and pollination. The educational sessions will be focused on the bat communities surveyed, but it will be oriented to habitat conservation in general. This project will have an important impact in bat conservation in Bolivia, because it focuses on the most crucial aspects at present, principally the paucity of information and persecution by rural communities.