Functional responses of insectivorous bats to increasing housing density support 'land-sparing' rather than ‘land-sharing’ urban growth strategies

Debates about ‘land-sparing’ and ‘land-sharing’ strategies for conserving biodiversity in cities provide an overly simplistic characterization of alternate planning options. Increased urbanization manifests in a number of ways and sophisticated analyses of how species respond to urban environments are required before generalizations about the relative merits of either planning strategy should be made. We investigated how insectivorous bats respond to housing density (a measure of urbanization intensity) and a range of habitat variables by modelling the occupancy and activity of 12 species in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to species-level analyses, species were grouped into guilds (‘matrix’, ‘patch’ or ‘edge’ species) depending on their ecomorphology and level of patch-dependency. Housing density (dwellings per hectare: dph) was the dominant explanatory variable of occupancy and activity of most species studied. Site occupancy probabilities of patch and edge species were reduced by h...