
Isham recently attended the Texas Society of Mammalogists Annual Meeting and presented his work: “Forest Fragments Contribute to the Maintenance of Paleotropical Bats Functional Diversity” where he won the Vernon Bailey Award for the best poster presentation in classical mammalogy at the organismal level. His work highlights that there is an increasing dissimilarity between co-existing species in forest fragments relative to those in continuous forests, a pattern that may be linked to niche expansion. Overall, forest fragments may contribute to the maintenance of functional diversity of insectivorous bat communities at the landscape level, although large tracts of forest are important for forest specialists.