Fig 1.
Site-wide P. destructans prevalence in Oablentario, Alabama, and Arkansas before treatment application.
For each location, n = 120.
Fig 2.
Log10 transformed fungal loads of Pseudogymnoascus destructans in ng across four treatments during the 2018–2019 hibernation season in the Arkansas, Ontario, and Alabama sites.
CON = control, ISO = isopropyl alcohol, PEG = polyethylene glycol, UV-C = ultraviolet-C radiation. Circles represent individual outliers at each treatment-time combination. P. destructans was not detected during early summer sampling in the Alabama site. Note that time was treated as a continuous predictor variable in our models (see methods) but was difficult to visualize graphically when combined with treatment so is plotted here as discrete bars for convenience. No treatment effects were significant but the significant interaction between time and treatment (driven by the effect of isopropyl alcohol; see results) is shown by the asterisk. No other treatment or time effects were significant.
Fig 3.
The fraction of sampled 20 cm diameter treatment cells that tested positive for Pseudogymnoascus destructans.
Each site had 120 cells during the pre-treatment period; however, only cells that were P. destructans positive were retained in the experiment, which is reflected in the sample sizes (n=). CON = control, ISO = isopropyl alcohol, PEG = polyethylene glycol, UV-C = ultraviolet-C radiation. Note that time was treated as a continuous predictor variable in our models but was difficult to visualize when combined with treatment so is plotted here as discrete bars for convenience. No treatment effects or interactions were significant but significant effects of sampling time, which only occurred in the Ontario site (see results), are shown by asterisks. The effect of sampling time was not significant in the Alabama or Arkansas sites.
Fig 4.
Fraction of sampled cells with Pseudogymnoascus destructans present in bat hibernacula sites in Alabama, Arkansas, and Ontario during late winter (February – March 2019).
CON = control, ISO = isopropyl alcohol, PEG = polyethylene glycol, UV-C = ultraviolet-C radiation, OUT = randomly selected areas outside the treatment zone where bats were excluded. Areas sampled where bats were present were not significantly different from untreated control cells inside the treatment zone where bats were excluded.
Fig 5.
Shannon Diversity Index for bacterial taxa (A) and fungal taxa (B) in treatment cells in the hibernaculum in Ontario.
The genus Pseudosgymnoascus was removed from fungal taxa diversity calculations because potential reductions in P. destructans, the targeted fungal species, would alter calculations of non-target effects. CON = control, ISO = isopropyl alcohol, PEG = polyethylene glycol, UV-C = ultraviolet-C radiation. Pre-treatment = “baseline” Shannon diversity before treatments occurred. The significant effect of treatment and time on bacterial diversity, driven solely by isopropyl alcohol (see results), is shown by the asterisk in A. The trend for declining fungal diversity with time was not significant.