Midwest Fish & Wildlife Conference 2016

AUTHORS: Jocelyn Karsk*, Ball State University; Dr. Tim Carter, Ball State University; Scott Haulton, Indiana DNR, Division of Forestry

ABSTRACT: Silviculture treatments have long been implemented on state forest lands in Indiana. There is a need to better understanding these influences on bat species in order to understand which forest management practices might best promote bat conservation, especially for threatened and endangered species. The northern long-eared bat Myotis septentrionalis was federally listed in 2015 and this listing is having major implications for land managers since the northern long-eared bat uses forested landscapes for summer roosting habitat. Our goal was to examine roost selection at the stand scale and how it might be influenced by historical harvest practices in a managed forest. Our study site was at the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) located in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest and Yellowwood State Forest in southern Indiana. We generated presence-only models of roost selection using the program MaxENT using 105 known roost locations to identify areas important to summer roosting habitat within our study area and to identify important stand-scale factors in habitat selection. The landscape variables that we used were elevation, aspect, slope, distance to major roads, distance to regeneration openings, distance to harvested edges, and forest type. With decreasing populations and likelihood of captures, models may become an important alternative for informing future management actions.