Toward solving the global green-green dilemma between wind energy production and bat conservation.

Wind energy production is growing rapidly worldwide in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, wind energy production is not environmentally neutral. Negative impacts on volant animals, such as bats, include fatalities at turbines and habitat loss due to land-use change and displacement. Siting turbines away from ecologically sensitive areas and implementing measures to reduce fatalities are critical to protecting bat populations. Restricting turbine operations during periods of high bat activity is the most effective form of mitigation currently available to reduce fatalities. Compensating for habitat loss and offsetting mortality are not often practiced, because meaningful offsets are lacking. Legal frameworks to prevent or mitigate the negative impacts of wind energy on bats are absent in most countries, especially in emerging markets. Therefore, governments and lending institutions are key in reconciling wind energy production with biodiversity goals by requiring sufficient environmental standards for wind energy projects.

ChiroVox: a public library of bat calls.

Recordings of bat echolocation and social calls are used for many research purposes from ecological studies to taxonomy. Effective use of these relies on identification of species from the recordings, but comparative recordings or detailed call descriptions to support identification are often lacking for areas with high biodiversity. The ChiroVox website (https://www.chirovox.org) was created to facilitate the sharing of bat sound recordings together with their metadata, including biodiversity data and recording circumstances. To date, more than 30 researchers have contributed over 3,900 recordings of nearly 200 species, making ChiroVox the largest open-access bat call library currently available. Each recording has a unique identifier that can be cited in publications; hence the acoustic analyses are repeatable. Most of the recordings available through the website are from bats whose species identities are confirmed, so they can be used to determine species in recordings where the bats were not captured or could not be identified. We hope that with the help of the bat researcher community, the website will grow rapidly and will serve as a solid source for bat acoustic research and monitoring.

Bat point counts: A novel sampling method shines light on flying bat communities.

Emerging technologies based on the detection of electro-magnetic energy offer promising opportunities for sampling biodiversity. We exploit their potential by showing here how they can be used in bat point counts-a novel method to sample flying bats-to overcome shortcomings of traditional sampling methods, and to maximize sampling coverage and taxonomic resolution of this elusive taxon with minimal sampling bias. We conducted bat point counts with a sampling rig combining a thermal scope to detect bats, an ultrasound recorder to obtain echolocation calls, and a near-infrared camera to capture bat morphology. We identified bats with a dedicated identification key combining acoustic and morphological features, and compared bat point counts with the standard bat sampling methods of mist-netting and automated ultrasound recording in three oil palm plantation sites in Indonesia, over nine survey nights. Based on rarefaction and extrapolation sampling curves, bat point counts were similarly effective but more time-efficient than the established methods for sampling the oil palm species pool in our study. Point counts sampled species that tend to avoid nets and those that are not echolocating, and thus cannot be detected acoustically. We identified some bat sonotypes with near-infrared imagery, and bat point counts revealed strong sampling biases in previous studies using capture-based methods, suggesting similar biases in other regions might exist. Our method should be tested in a wider range of habitats and regions to assess its performance. However, while capture-based methods allow to identify bats with absolute and internal morphometry, and unattended ultrasound recorders can effectively sample echolocating bats, bat point counts are a promising, non-invasive, and potentially competitive new tool for sampling all flying bats without bias and observing their behavior in the wild.

Flower-visiting insects of genus Melastoma (Myrtales: Melastomataceae) at the Fushan Botanical Garden, Taiwan.

BACKGROUND: We investigated the diversity and behaviour of insects that visit flowers of four native Melastoma (Family Melastomataceae) species of Taiwan and a horticultural hybrid Melastoma species at the Fushan Botanical Garden, Taiwan biweekly from May to August 2020. Visits of flower-visiting insects were classified into seven behavioural categories, based on the insects' behaviour and positions on the flower. The data are further assigned into four insect-flower interactions, namely pollination, herbivory, commensalism and neutralism. Our goal is to provide baseline data of insect-plant interactions of Melastoma, which is a common, but understudied plant genus in the country. NEW INFORMATION: A total of 1,289 visits to flowers were recorded by at least 63 insect morphospecies belonging to seven orders. The number of insect species recorded per Melastoma species ranged from 9 to 39. Visiting, sonication and passing were the three most frequently recorded types of behaviour, collectively accounting for 90.2% (n = 1,240) of the total observations. Pollination was the most dominant insect-flower interaction, accounting for 70.2% of the total observations, followed by neutralism (20.0%), herbivory (6.3%) and commensalism (3.5%). Sweat bees of the genera Lasioglossum and Maculonomia (Hymenoptera: Halictidae) are considered key pollinators to Melastoma species in Fushan Botanical Garden, based on their high number of visits and sonication behaviour. Our study provides the first list of insects that visit the flowers of all Taiwan's known Melastoma species and description of their interactions with the plants.

Sampling flying bats with thermal and near-infrared imaging and ultrasound recording: hardware and workflow for bat point counts.

Bat communities can usually only be comprehensively monitored by combining ultrasound recording and trapping techniques. Here, we propose bat point counts, a novel, single method to sample all flying bats. We designed a sampling rig that combines a thermal scope to detect flying bats and their flight patterns, an ultrasound recorder to identify echolocating bat calls, and a near-infrared camera and LED illuminator to photograph bat morphology. We evaluated the usefulness of the flight pattern information, echolocation call recordings, and near-infrared photographs produced by our sampling rig to determine a workflow to process these heterogenous data types. We present a conservative workflow to enable taxonomic discrimination and identification of bat detections. Our sampling rig and workflow allowed us to detect both echolocating and non-echolocating bats and we could assign 84% of the detections to a guild. Subsequent identification can be carried out with established methods such as identification keys and call libraries, based on the visible morphological features and echolocation calls. Currently, a higher near-infrared picture quality is required to resolve more detailed diagnostic morphology, but there is considerable potential to extract more information with higher-intensity illumination. This is the first proof-of-concept for bat point counts, a method that can passively sample all flying bats in their natural environment.

The systematic position of Hypsugo macrotis (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) and a new record from Peninsular Malaysia.

The Southeast Asian species of Hypsugo are rare bats, except for H. cadornae and H. pulveratus, which are distributed throughout the Indomalayan region. Hypsugo macrotis is restricted to Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and adjacent islands, and is known only from a handful of specimens. Here we report a new locality record of the species from Seremban, Peninsular Malaysia, which also represents the first known building-dweller colony of any Hypsugo from the region. We discuss the taxonomic status of two morphologically similar species, H. macrotis and H. vordermanni, and provide the first COI and cyt b gene sequences for H. macrotis and reconstruct the species' phylogenetic relationships.

Thumb-pads up-a new species of thick-thumbed bat from Sumatra (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae: Glischropus).

To date, three species of the genus Glischropus are recognized from the Indomalayan zoogeographic region-G. bucephalus from the Indochinese subregion, G. tylopus from the Sundaic subregion (Peninsular Thailand and Malaysia, Borneo, Sumatra, Moluccas) and G. javanus, restricted to Java. The investigation of the holotype and three topotype specimens of G. batjanus supported the view that the name was previously correctly regarded as the junior subjective synonym of G. tylopus. During review of material recently collected in southwestern Sumatra, Indonesia, one specimen of a yet undescribed species of Thick-thumbed bat was identified. G. aquilus n. sp. markedly differs from its congeners by its dark brown pelage, nearly black ear and tragus, and in skull proportions. The phylogenetic analysis based on cytb sequences also supports the specific distinctness of G. aquilus n. sp. Its discovery brings the count to 88 species of bats known from Sumatra.