Phylogeography and predicted distribution of African-Arabian and Malagasy populations of giant mastiff bats, Otomops spp. (Chiroptera: Molossidae)

Cross-genus amplification and characterisation of microsatellite loci in the large-eared free tailed bat, Otomops (Chiroptera: Molossidae) from Africa and Madagascar

“…However, Russell et al (2005) used microsatellites to study the population genetics of the American species, Tadarida brasiliensis, and recently Naidoo et al (2013) reported on the utility of the primers of Russell et al (2005) to cross-amplify polymorphic microsatellites in the molossid species, Chaerephon pumilus sensu lato from south eastern Africa. Afro-tropical members of the Old World genus Otomops, Otomops martiensseni from Africa (including the Arabian Peninsula) and Otomops madagascariensis from Madagascar, have a wide but somewhat sparse distribution throughout the region (Peterson et al, 1995;Simmons, 2005;Lamb et al, 2008). According to the 2008 IUCN (The World Conservation Union) Red List of Threatened Species, O. martiensseni has been classified globally as having a "Near Threatened" status (Mickleburgh et al, 2008).…”

“…According to the 2008 IUCN (The World Conservation Union) Red List of Threatened Species, O. martiensseni has been classified globally as having a "Near Threatened" status (Mickleburgh et al, 2008). Although species-level phylogenetic and phylogeographic investigations of Otomops have been undertaken (Lamb et al, 2006(Lamb et al, , 2008, fine-scale genetic investigations within the genus have been limited, leaving many unanswered questions including the number of species and taxonomic status of Afro-tropical individuals.…”

Integrating molecular ecology and predictive modelling: implications for the conservation of the barbastelle bat (Barbastella barbastellus) in Portugal

“…Recently, the application of predictive modelling to past conditions (hindcasting) has helped in the determination of a species' potential distribution in events like the Last Glacial Maximum (Hugall et al 2002;Waltari et al 2007). The application of this technique together with genetic analysis could allow a better understanding of population structure (Lamb et al 2008;Gebremedhin et al 2009). …”

“…Predictive modelling has already been proven to be a powerful tool for inferring the potential distribution of a species (Greaves et al 2006; and some techniques are robust enough to use presence data only, even when data are scarce and collected in non-systematic ways (Brotons et al 2004;Elith et al 2006;Hernandez et al 2006Hernandez et al , 2009. Moreover, because population structure may result from both current and historic events, it is also important to consider the roles of past climatic conditions in determining geographic ranges in the past (Lamb et al 2008;Flanders et al 2011). Recently, the application of predictive modelling to past conditions (hindcasting) has helped in the determination of a species' potential distribution in events like the Last Glacial Maximum (Hugall et al 2002;Waltari et al 2007).…”

Developing macrohabitat models for bats in parks using maxent and testing them with data collected by citizen scientists

“…Although we had absence data for our sites, the data can be misleading as we cannot be confident that these are true absences (Anderson, 2003). Maxent has been used to successfully model the distributions of a range of taxa: plants (Schetter, 2012;Kumar and Stohlgren, 2009), exotic ant species (Ward et al, 2007), birds (Elith et al, 2006), geckos (Pearson et al, 2007), as well as African (Lamb et al, 2008), Asian (Hughes et al, 2012), and European (Rebelo et al, 2010) bats. The program takes the user-defined environmental layers within a geographic area and estimates the probability distribution of maximum entropy (or closest to uniform).…”