Homestead National Heritage Park is seeking assistance in understanding the temporal and spatial utilization of the park by various bat species.
The park is working to reintroduce fire at regular intervals to help the vegetation better represent the landscape the first settlers would have encountered. The park plans to conduct low intensity burns in woodland areas to reduce fire intolerant species (such as hackberry trees) and improve the habitat for fire tolerant species (such as bur oak). As funding and time allow, targeted thinning is planned to be used to open the woodland. To minimize negative impacts on bats, as a species of concern, the park requires updated research on:
- What species are in the park, when they are present, and how they use different areas of the park.
- To distinguish local management actions’ impacts from impacts more broadly in the bats home range, we also need to identify their probable wintering grounds.
The goals of this project are to update existing park data using a combination of mist netting, roost emergence counts, and Motus tracking locally within the park, and incidentally across the bats’ home ranges. The data collected in this study will be used to directly inform the management of park resources to minimize impacts on bats. We anticipate that these data will help us revise burn plans and other park planning efforts. We also expect that analysis of Motus tracks can help managers disambiguate impacts on bats due to local park management actions versus threats migratory bats are facing across their home range.
Specific questions are:
- What species of bats are still present in the park compared to the 2019 and earlier baselines?
- What specific portions of the park are bats using for different activities (e.g. feeding, roosting)?
- Where are the probable migratory and overwintering grounds of these species as identified by the Motus Wildlife Tracking System?
- What is the site fidelity of the tagged bats?
Please see attachments for more information. Direct questions and statements of interest to: Jesse Bolli, Resource Management Specialist, Homestead National Historical Park. Jesse_Bolli@nps.gov or 402-223-1705.
Funding Amount: $33,000 total
RSOI Deadline: April 14, 2026 CDT