Bat feces: A reliable source of climate change.

Bat feces: A reliable source of climate change.Isotopes found in bat guano over the last 1,200 years provide scientists with information on how the climate was and is changing. People have long known that bat guano -- the polite term for what the flying mammals leave on the floors of caves where they live worldwide -- is a valuable source of fuel and fertilizer, but now newly published research from University of South Florida geoscientists show that the refuse is also a reliable record of climate change. In a new paper published in the research journal Scientific Reports, USF geochemistry Professor Bogdan Onac and PhD student Daniel Cleary report that isotopes found in bat guano over the last 1,200 years can provide scientists with information on how the climate was and is changing. The scientists examined bat guano from a cave in northwestern Romania to produce new insight into how the climate in east-central Europe has changed since the Medieval Warm Period, about 850 AD.