Elevation is a strong proxy for the thermal environment because it causes a predictable drop in temperature and food availability. This restricts cave-dwelling bats to species with specific metabolic traits, such as torpor or migration to avoid cold...
Eastern European broadleaved forests north of the 50th degree of latitude serve as a core breeding area for most migratory bat species wintering in Eastern and Central Europe. The southern border of this region has faced an increase in clear-cutting...
Caves are characterized by unique abiotic conditions such as limited light, and they therefore support distinct faunal assemblages that often include endemic species. Due to light limitations, photoautotrophic organisms are absent from many subterran...
Woodland bat assemblages are usually structured in a space according to the distance from the ground, water, and obstacles, features that often define chiropteran hunting tactics. Consequently, the bat species composition differs strongly among vario...
Habitat loss and land-use intensification are major threats to biodiversity in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, particularly for bat assemblages that provide key ecosystem services. In this study, we examined how landscape composition (forest and pastu...
Giardia duodenalis is a globally distributed intestinal protozoan infecting humans and animals. This study investigated its occurrence, genetic diversity, and histopathological findings in rodents and bats from the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado of sout...
Bats play a fundamental role in ecosystem functioning since they are responsible for several ecological services such as seed dispersal and pollination. Therefore, assessing the effects of habitat structure at different scales on the bat assemblage i...
Ecological thresholds represent a critical tipping point along an environmental gradient that, once breached, can have irreversible consequences for species persistence and assemblage structure. Thresholds can also be used to identify species with th...
Studies of fungi in caves have become increasingly important with the advent of white-nose syndrome (WNS), a disease caused by the invasive fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) that has killed an estimated 6.5 million North American bats. We swab...
This study is the first step towards more systematic monitoring of urban bat fauna in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries by collecting bat echolocation call parameters in Ho Chi Minh and Tra Vinh cities. We captured urban bats and then recor...
The introduction of Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) to North America, agent of white-nose syndrome in hibernating bats, has increased interest in fungi from underground habitats. While bats are assumed to be the main vector transmitting Pd cave-to-...
Vertical stratification is a key component of the biological complexity of rainforests. Understanding community- and species-level responses to disturbance across forest strata is paramount for evidence-based conservation and management. However, eve...
The Brunca region in Costa Rica contains the largest number of caves in the country, yet the diversity and distribution of bat species within those caves is currently unknown. Without this information, it is not possible to assess changes in populati...
The study describes a pilot survey on bats in the highest areas of Pirin Mountain. The methods included examining subfossil bone remains, mist-netting, and recording echolocation calls. The study was conducted in August 2002 and 2013 and from 2019 to...
Native predators provide undervalued pest suppression services to agriculture. Studies of pest consumption by insectivorous bats tend to focus upon single species in large, centralized colonies, while bats dispersed in small groups within the agricul...
In Neotropical bats, studies on bite force have focused mainly on differences in trophic ecology, and little is known about whether factors other than body size generate interspecific differences in bite force amongst insectivorous bats and, conseque...
The increase in mean annual temperature and reduction in summer rainfall from climate change seem to increase the frequency of natural and human-made disturbances to forest vegetation. This type of rapid vegetation change also significantly affects b...
Bats are a vital component of tropical forest ecosystems, providing essential services such as pollination, seed dispersal, and insect population regulation. Despite Malaysia’s high bat diversity, research has largely focused on lowland diptero...
Research Highlights: Seasonal variation in environmental conditions coinciding with reproductive and energetic demands might result in seasonal differences in species-specific habitat use. We studied a winter assemblage of insectivorous bats and foun...
This work aims at assessing the impact of two-dimensional particle size distribution (2D-PSD) on the identification of water vapor diffusivity in micrometric size cellulose particles displaying a size aspect ratio lower than 2 and a cylindrical shape...
Africa faces significant challenges in reconciling economic and social development while preserving its natural resources. Little is known about the diverse bat community on the continent, particularly in drier ecosystems. A better understanding of t...
Uropodina mites are organisms regularly found in the breeding sites of vertebrates. However, studies devoted to the nest dwellers of hole-nesting birds have been performed nearly exclusively in artificial places, i.e., nest boxes. Here, we describe a...
Malaria is responsible for major diseases of humans, while associated haemosporidians are important factors in regulating wildlife populations. Polychromophilus, a haemosporidian parasite of bats, is phylogenetically close to human-pathogenic Plasmod...
The widespread perception of New Zealand is of a group of remote islands dominated by reptiles and birds, with no native mammals except a few bats. In fact, the islands themselves are only part of a wider New Zealand Region which includes a large sec...
Bats are known reservoirs of a wide variety of viruses that rarely result in overt clinical disease in the bat host. However, anthropogenic influences on the landscape and climate can change species assemblages and interactions, as well as undermine...
Urbanization poses important environmental, social, and ecological pressures, representing a major threat to biodiversity. However, urban areas are highly heterogeneous, with some greenspaces (e.g., urban forests, parks, private gardens) providing re...
Bat communities are affected by the constant growth of cities; however, urban and suburban environments can support distinct biological assemblages. In this study, we compared bat diversity (richness and abundance), structure, and dissimilarity of ba...
The Guiana Shield of South America contains savannas within one of the largest contiguous expanses of pristine tropical rainforest remaining in the world, but biodiversity in the grasslands is poorly known. In lowland Neotropical areas, bats typicall...
Caves share unique conditions that have led to convergent adaptations of cave-dwelling animals. In addition, local factors act as filters on regional species-pools to shape the assemblage composition of local caves. Surveys of 35 Levantine caves, dis...
The skin of bats hosts diverse microbial communities, yet most research has focused on bacteria or single fungal pathogens such as Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Here, we present the first direct comparison of culturable skin mycobiota in the greater...
The Biodiversity and Bioindicators research group (BiBIO), based at the Natural Sciences Museum of Granollers, has coordinated four long-term faunal monitoring programmes based on citizen science over more than two decades in Catalonia (NE Spain). We...
Terrestrial small mammal species typically assemble according to plant communities, but multiple factors, including large-scale geographic patterns, influence their assemblage structure. Despite their ecological significance, small mammals are often...
Tropical rainforests are suffering rapid habitat loss with large extensions of land transformed into agriculture. We wanted to know whether the type of agricultural activity in forest-agricultural landscapes affects how species composition as well as...
Paleo- and neo-taphonomic analyses of bone assemblages rarely consider all the occurring taxa in a single study and works concerning birds of prey as accumulators of microvertebrate bone remains mostly focus on small mammals such as rodents and soric...
The distribution of authigenic phosphates in the sedimentary sequence of prehistoric Denisova Cave (Altai, South Siberia) has important archeological implications. The sampled Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene sedimentary sequence in the East Cha...
Given the significant impact of mosquito-borne flaviviruses (MBFVs) on both human and animal health, predicting their dynamics and understanding their transmission cycle is of the utmost importance. Usually, predictions about the distribution of prio...
Urban densification threatens biodiversity, yet conventional greenspace expansion is constrained by limited land availability. Living wall systems (LWS) offer potential biodiversity enhancement through vertical green infrastructure, though their ecol...
Vertebrate pollination is widespread in Musaceae, with birds and bats serving as the main pollen vectors across the family. While these systems are typically well defined, the Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa) has long been regarded as an exception,...
The lava tubes at Undara became internationally recognised in the late 1980s, when 24 species of terrestrial cave-adapted invertebrates (troglobionts) were recorded from Bayliss Cave, making it one of the 20 richest known cave communities in the worl...
Large cavities are important for maintaining forest biodiversity. However, accurately assessing cavity use and identifying the communities of organisms associated with these structures remain challenging and are still insufficiently studied. Between...
A novel extracellular lipase from a filamentous fungus Ascomycota strain, P22, was isolated from olive mill wastewater, then purified and characterized. This strain was identified as Penicillium crustosum Thom based on sequencing analyses. Penicilliu...
This study aimed to characterize the fermentation of commercial xylooligosaccharide (XOS) using Lactiplantibacillus plantarum S61. XOS was utilized as the main carbon source in a modified MRS medium (MRSm) at concentrations of 1%, 2%, 4%, and 6% (w/v...
This work describes the immobilization and the characterization of purified Penicillium crustosum Thom P22 lipase (PCrL) using adsorption, encapsulation, and adsorption–encapsulation approaches. The maximum activity of the immobilized PCrL on C...