Bats of Northern Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

With 380 species, bats make up nearly 40% of Southeast Asia’s mammal species but have received limited attention in biodiversity studies. To redress this, Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Unit (SEABCRU, www.seabcru.org/) developed a database for bat locality data across SE Asia. The database is a full implementation and designed to push new records to GBIF. The database has c. 40K records including cleaned and manually georeferenced GBIF records, data from literature, museums and field notes. Our prior research shows that SE Asian bat data in open-source resources are strongly biased taxonomically, spatially, and ecologically with consequences for models that underpin conservation policy. Of note is the lack of data for open-space insectivorous species that forage in non-forested habitats. Despite comprising over 30% of SE Asian bat diversity, these species are hard to record using conventional methods. However, occurrence data for these bats can be generated through acoustic sampling, but this requires a dedicated call database. In our review, call descriptions from over 40% of the 270 echolocating species have been reported in literature, but none of the recordings are accessible and many of the species occurrences attached are not published. The Hungarian Natural History Museum (HNHM, www.nhmus.hu) has recently received government support to develop the Asian Bat Call Database (ABCD). To fill current gaps in bat diversity in GBIF, we will (1) integrate the occurrence and acoustic databases to capture species occurrence data represented by acoustic recordings, (2) train researchers to assemble and format existing data following the Darwin Core standard through workshops, webinars and development of tools, (3) publish completed datasets to GBIF. We are confident that with additional support from GBIF, we could properly address the issues listed through the proposed activities and elevate the impact of GBIF network to biodiversity research in Southeast Asia