Male Seminole Bat Winter Roost-Site Selection in a Managed Forest

Understanding year-round roost-site selection is essential for managing forest bat populations. From January to March, 2004 to 2006, we used radiotelemetry to investigate winter roost-site selection by Seminole bats (Lasiurus seminolus) on an intensively managed landscape with forested corridors in southeastern South Carolina, USA. We modeled roost-site selection with logistic regression and used Akaike's Information Criterion for small samples (AICc) and Akaike weights to select models relating roost-site selection to plot- and landscape-level variables. We tracked 20 adult male bats to 71 individual roosts. Bats used a variety of roosting structures, including the canopy of overstory trees, understory vegetation, pine (Pinus spp.) needle clusters, and leaf litter. Roost height, structure type, and habitat type were influenced by changes in minimum nightly temperature. On warmer nights, bats selected taller trees in mature forest stands, but when minimum nightly temperatures were