Caves are expected to become warmer and drier with climate change

This Project Grant award of $177,895.00 from the U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service under the White-nose Syndrome National Response Implementation program (CFDA 15.684) will fund research to quantify the impacts of climate change on cave microclimates and their effects on white-nose syndrome dynamics in tricolored bats across 60 caves in the southeastern United States. The primary awardee, North Carolina State University, will collaborate with a sub-awardee, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, to understand how cave microclimate factors like temperature, humidity, and forest cover influence the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, as well as the resulting impacts on tricolored bat populations. The project aims to provide cave managers with data-driven strategies to conserve climate refugia and improve resilience for tricolored bats affected by this devastating disease. The award period is from August 1, 2024 to July 31, 2026.

These changes may negatively impact cave-dwelling species, such as bats. For example, bats require a specific range of temperatures and relative humidities during hibernation, and cave climates can impact how severely bats are affected by white-nose syndrome, an emerging infectious disease. Fortunately, microclimates vary both within and among cave systems, and relatively cool and wet caves may serve as refugia in a changing climate. Where these refugia exist, cave managers would like to identify and conserve them. However, IT is unclear which geological, geographical, or biological characteristics or processes create refugia, and, thus, IT is unclear which management actions can best conserve refugia. For example, forest cover is hypothesized to reduce solar radiation and therefore local cave temperatures, but how much of an impact could cave managers have on cave microclimates by conserving surface forest cover? In this project, we propose to quantify how cave microclimates impact the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome where IT occurs on cave substrates and on tricolored bats across 60 caves in the southeast united states. This includes comparing fungus dynamics during hibernation to fungus dynamics in summer, because a recent analysis found that most caves in the southeast harbor a few tricolored bats during the summer. This project will also quantify how much forest cover and other variables that managers can control (e.g., cave gates, human visitation) impact cave microclimates and thus white-nose syndrome dynamics. Therefore, the data generated from this project will be immediately useful to the federal, state, non-government organizations, and private cave managers who hope to improve climate resilience for the 60 caves included in this study. More broadly, this project will yield important new insights regarding how widespread summer cave use by tricolored bats in the southeast U.S. Impacts white-nose syndrome dynamics.