Data from: Does sex matter? Gender-specific responses to forest fragmentation in Neotropical bats

Understanding the consequences of habitat modification on wildlife
communities is central to the development of conservation strategies.
However, albeit male and female individuals of numerous species are known
to exhibit differences in habitat use, sex-specific responses to habitat
modification remain little explored. Here, we used a landscape-scale
fragmentation experiment to assess, separately for males and females, the
effects of fragmentation on the abundance of Carollia perspicillata and
Rhinophylla pumilio, two widespread Neotropical frugivorous bats. We
predicted that sex-specific responses would arise from higher energetic
requirements from pregnancy and lactation in females. Analyses were
conducted independently for each season, and we further investigated the
joint responses to local and landscape-scale metrics of habitat quality,
composition, and configuration. Although males and females responded
similarly to a fragmentation gradient composed by continuous forest,
fragment interiors, edges, and matrix habitats, we found marked
differences between sexes in habitat use for at least one of the seasons.
Whereas the sex ratio varied little in continuous forest and fragment
interiors, females were found to be more abundant than males in edge and
matrix habitats. This difference was more prominent in the dry season, the
reproductive season of both species. For both species, abundance responses
to local- and landscape-scale predictors differed between sexes and again,
differences were more pronounced in the dry season. The results suggest
considerable sex-mediated responses to forest disruption and degradation
in tropical bats and complement our understanding of the impacts of
fragmentation on tropical forest vertebrate communities.