Longitudinal impacts of habitat fragmentation on and hemotropic dynamics in vampire bats.

Habitat fragmentation can have negative impacts on wildlife including increased risk of infectious disease. To assess spatiotemporal changes in pathogen dynamics in vampire bats () in response to habitat fragmentation, we used general linear mixed models to investigate the influence of site, year, and tree cover on the prevalence of and hemotropic (hemoplasma) in bats in one large and one small forest fragment in northern Belize across seven years. was marginally more prevalent in later years, while year and site differences in hemoplasma infections were driven by a peak in prevalence in the third year of the study in the small fragment. prevalence increased with forest loss, but only in the large fragment, whereas hemoplasma prevalence showed a marginal negative response to forest loss. The effects of site, year, and forest loss on infection likelihood varied by pathogen genotype. Neither site nor year affected genotypes, but one genotype was positively associated with tree cover. Two hemoplasma genotypes were influenced by year, but with differing trends. One genotype increased with tree cover regardless of site while another increased with forest loss at the small fragment only. Our work demonstrates that the effects of habitat fragmentation on infection prevalence depended on both the pathogen and specific genotype. Our findings complicate expectations of how habitat fragmentation affects infectious disease dynamics in bats. As such, management practices aimed at mitigating the impacts of infectious diseases in fragmented systems should be tailored to specific pathogens of concern.