Migratory Mexican free-tailed bats provide $18M in annual ecosystem service values in limitation of damage to cotton crops and eco-tourism in the SW US and Mexico. The majority of the service values so far known are accrued in the US by bats that depend on habitat in Mexico. We map the seasonal distributions of bats onto three categories of land tenure (private, public, communal) and integrate service values with the seasonal presence of bats in US and Mexico. Our results show that bats in Mexico occupy primarily communal land. Furthermore, our results show that communal Mexico is sending benefit to private Texas. This scenario helps us to identify potential costs of land use change in critical roost and habitat and the stakeholders that benefit from them. This framework is helpful for analyzing the potential spatially explicit costs and benefits in the cross boundary, binational context.
