Does Landscape Change Matter? Change Metrics Analysis, Landscape Level and its Impact on the Bat Population of Thar Desert, Rajasthan

Bats use the landscape as their habitat to thrive and survive for years and have high site fidelity for their traditional roosting places.This is highly collaborated with other cofactors like optimum humidity and temperate.Over the years of anthropogenic activities at the landscape level, bats also explore them as an opportunity to expand their species distribution range as well and the same can have a negative impact too.The present study gives an opportunity to understand this in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan and the outcome is interesting to extrapolate the hypothesis.In Western Rajasthan, we explored three major districts namely Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Barmer.Over the years urbanization in Jodhpur has led to habitat loss for bats, Barmer become a hub of many horticulture crops due to many affirmative and promotional schemes by the Government and large areas of Jaisalmer are now under agriculture, left a negative impact on the vast open habitats in desert country.Bats are very sensitive towards their habitat change and this can be understood from the way landscape-level changes.