Impacts of land-use change on bat functional diversity with implications for resilience of West African agroecosystems

Agricultural expansion is a major driver of global biodiversity loss, reshaping species assemblages and disrupting ecological functions essential for ecosystem resilience. These effects are most pronounced in tropical forests yet remain poorly understood for many taxa, including bats that provide key ecosystem services but are highly sensitive to habitat change. We quantified shifts in bat community composition and functional diversity along three land-use gradients from intact forest to cacao farmland in southwestern Ghana. Using live-trapping, genetic identification and trait-based analyses of 995 individuals, we measured changes in functional richness, evenness and dispersion. Declining forest cover drove substantial shifts in community composition, with contrasting responses among dietary guilds. Forest-dependent insectivorous species declined sharply in richness and abundance, whereas fruit- and nectar-feeding pteropodids increased. Functional richness, evenness and dispersion also declined with forest loss, driven by contraction of trait space formerly occupied by forest-interior insectivores and the proliferation of edge- and open-space foragers. Bat assemblages in agricultural landscapes retained only a subset of the functional roles present in native forest, with a collapse in the insectivore guild suggesting reduced capacity for natural pest consumption. By identifying core components of biodiversity most vulnerable to land-use change, these findings improve our ability to anticipate ecological consequences and inform conservation planning in the Afrotropics, a biodiverse but data-poor region where agricultural frontiers are rapidly expanding.