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Mandy Burnier

Research interests

Light pollution has been an emerging threat to nocturnal species for the last 50 years. The Val-de-Ruz (Neuchâtel - Switzerland) is a municipality that has been experimenting for a few years with a partial extinction of artificial lights from midnight to 5am. Generally, we can divide bats into two categories according to their morphology and their hunting mode: the slow flying gleaners and the fast-flying ones. The slower species will avoid light, whereas the faster species will take advantage of the attraction of light by certain types of insects in order to hunt them. We predicted that light pollution will have a more negative impact on slow-flying bats compared to faster flying species. In addition, we predicted that partial extinction after midnight will have a generally positive impact on all species. In order to test these predictions, passive listening was used to determine the activity of bats.