Wednesday was the first day  of in-class presentations on landscape ecology. However, I ended up presenting on Friday.

The topic of my presentation was a paper written in 2019 analyzing the impact of night time light pollution on bat presence probability and landscape habitat connectivity. The study took place in the city of Lille, France and data was gathered through audio recordings of bats echolocating, as well as from a NOAA light raster.

Analysis in QGIS was used to construct bat presence probability based on light pollution and recorded data, with an algorithm to create a probability raster. Linkagemapping Toolkit in ArcGIS Pro was used to map least cost pathways that represent movement corridors for bat movements.

Results showed each species of bat impacted in different ways, with one species being adverse to light pollution, one species being more prevalent with increasing light, and one species preferring small amounts of light. Overall it was deemed that light pollution was a good indicator of bat presence, but still less so than distance to wetlands.

One other presentation I found interesting was the study concerning modelling lynx populations. I was able to see how the Linkage Mapper Toolkit was application to modelling species habitat connectivity in various other landscape types.