| Carrie
E. Seltzer |
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I am in the lab of Henry F. Howe at UIC, and am
also advised by Bruce
Patterson from the Field Museum of Natural History.  I am interested in seed dispersal, bats, and habitat fragmentation. I plan to combine these interests by studying seed dispersal by frugivorous bats in the fragmented forests of the East Usambara Mountains in Tanzania. The main questions I want to investigate are: 1) How are fruit bats affected by habitat loss and fragmentation? Frugivorous bats in Africa all belong to the Old World family Pteropodidae, and are phylogenetically distinct from fruit bats found in the Americas which belong to the family Phyllostomidae. Relatively few studies have investigated the impacts of fragmentation on Pteropodid bats. Since many of these species are at risk of extinction, it is critical to understand how habitat loss and fragmentation will affect their conservation. 2) How does seed dispersal by bats change in a fragmented landscape? Bats disperse seeds of well over 100 tropical plant species. Many of these species are also dispersed by primates, birds, and/or rodents, but some species are dispersed almost entirely by bats. I am interested in how bats can maintain connectivity in a fragmented landscape, and at what level of fragmentation they cease to be effective dispersers of the fruits they consume. The role of bats as seed dispersers remains largely unstudied in Africa and their importance in forest regeneration relative to other frugivores is unknown. Field Site The East Usambara Mountatins are part of the Eastern Arc Mountain chain in Tanzania and southern Kenya. The Eastern Arc is a biodiversity hotspot and has hundreds of endemic plant species. The sub-montane forest of the East Usambaras has undergone extensive fragmentation over the past 100 years due to logging, tea plantations, and subsistence farming. The range of fragment sizes remaining provide a unique opportunity to examine the effects of fragmentation on fruit bat abundance, diversity, richness, and movement. |