Landscape and scale-dependent spatial niches of bats foraging above intensively used arable fields

Ecological Processes

Table 2 Summary of the best generalized linear mixed effect models fitted to species-specific relative bat activity (BA_P) and foraging activity (FA_P) using the binomial error distribution. All 29 candidate models (see model no. in Table 1) were compared via AICc to identify the best model (w _i ≥ 0.9; w _i is the weight of evidence of a model given the set of models; based on Burnham and Anderson (2002)). If no best model was found, we used the 90% confidence set of models for inference by summing up models from top to bottom until the accumulated number of weights reached w _i = 0.9 (Σ w _i). Here, we present only the most parsimonious models, so that Σ w _i values are smaller than 0.9 (complete overview in Additional file 5)

	Factor sets	Scale [km]	df	log()	AICc	Δ_i	w _i	Σ w _i	R² _cond.	Model no.
BA_P
Nyctalus noctula	Local and landscape combined	5	19	−370.96	786.6	0	0.50	0.61	0.25	17
Nyctalus noctula	Local and landscape combined	5	19	−372.46	789.6	3.00	0.11		0.25	16
Pipistrellus nathusii	Local and landscape combined	1	22	−284.21	621.5	0	0.39	0.60	0.25	14
P. pipistrellus	Local and landscape combined	3	23	−178.79	413.6	0	0.75	0.75	0.30	15
P. pygmaeus	Landscape	1	17	−247.74	534.7	0	0.64	0.64	0.33	7
FA_P
N. noctula	Local combined		12	−124.66	275.9	0	0.99	0.99	0.23	11
P. nathusii	Local combined		11	−60.22	144.6	0	0.99	0.99	0.40	11
P. pygmeaus	Null model		2	−68.79	141.7	0	0.66	0.66	0	1

Abbreviations: log( ) log likelihood, AICc Akaike information criterion corrected for small sample sizes, Δ _i difference in AICc values related to the best model, R ² _cond. conditional pseudo R ² gives the explained model variation including random factors