The Importance of Water Availability to Bats: Climate Warming and Increasing Global Aridity

Environmental change due to climate warming is accelerating in most of the world’s arid regions, pushing already xeric ecosystems towards drier conditions and expanding desert landscapes. These changes will alter community structures and species interactions globally. Because many arid regions, especially semi-arid zones, are relatively high in bat species richness, reactions of bat populations to increasing and intensifying droughts will affect food web dynamics and ecosystem services on nearly every continent. Although there is evidence that some species have preadaptations for surviving decreasing available water resources in arid regions, many species may succumb to the pace of climate warming and landscape xerification. As drought and aridity increase, many drinking sources will inevitably be lost, increasing competition for progressively limited resources, thereby affecting bats during the reproductive season when they are most vulnerable. Herein, we review how climate warming and increasing drought are currently altering bat population dynamics and model future viability of some species and populations. Documented declines in some bat populations, reductions in species richness, and changes in distributional ranges are already occurring in hardest hit areas and some models have been developed to predict future outcomes for bats living on the leading edge of climate disruption.