First record of the lesser horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus hipposideros (Borkhausen, 1797), in Libya and potential distribution in North Africa

Abstract

The lesser horseshoe bat has a broad distribution in warm temperate regions of Europe and Western Asia, and a patchy distribution in Africa. Common in the north-western part of North Africa, the species is missing more to the east. Hereby we report the first record in Libya, considerably extending its known geographic range. Additionally, we performed a species distribution modelling (SDM) analysis to explore its potential distribution in North Africa. The final SDM depicted a relatively well-known distribution and predicted that the suitable bioclimatic areas for this species are essentially found within the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub biome.

Some bats are here: Reducing the Wallacean shortfall of bats in the amazon

“…The environmental difference between the areas considered as sampling gaps for bats in Brazil and well‐sampled locations (Aguiar et al., 2020 ), measured based on the bioclimatic conditions used in SDM (Bendjeddou et al., 2022 ; Da Silva et al., 2021 ; Da Silva et al., 2022 ; Delgado‐Jaramillo et al., 2020 ; Pimenta et al., 2022 ), could explain why the distribution models presented here do not predict species occurrence in the region, even though the species is captured on‐site. Indeed, the failure of our models to predict occurrence may be a combination of limited sampling in the region, along with occurrence points that are concentrated in well‐sampled areas with different environmental conditions than our study area.…”