Bat Conservation Trust

This article describes the terrestrial and freshwater animal trend data used in creating the 2023 State of Nature reports for the UK and its constituent countries. Trend data for long- (1970–2020/21) and short-term (2010–2020) periods have been calculated by fitting statistical models to measures of abundance (753 species) or occupancy (4979 species) across the UK. Trend data was also calculated for each constituent country: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales for reduced sets of species.Trends in abundance data were generally created from the analysis of repeat counts at specific sites. Trends in occupancy were created by analysing ad hoc species records of invertebrates provided by volunteers. Statistical methods partially controlled for the risk of bias and the noisy nature of such occupancy data. Trends were only calculated where the number of species records justified the creation of trend statistics.Species that make up three key groups of insects are identified in additional columns in the dataset, those responsible for key ecosystem functions: species providing freshwater nutrient cycling, pollinating insects and predators of crop pests.The data has one clear limitation in that it is only a partial representation of the fauna of the UK. Many cryptic, nocturnal or soil dwelling species are poorly recorded and even some easy to identify species such as amphibians and reptiles do not have a suitable recording scheme that captures abundance.

Abstract There has been limited characterisation of bat-borne coronaviruses in Europe. Here, we screened for coronaviruses in 48 faecal samples from 16 of the 17 bat species breeding in the UK, collected through a bat rehabilitation and conservationist network. We recovered nine (two novel) complete genomes across six bat species: four alphacoronaviruses, a MERS-related betacoronavirus, and four closely related sarbecoviruses. We demonstrate that at least one of these sarbecoviruses can bind and use the human ACE2 receptor for infecting human cells, albeit suboptimally. Additionally, the spike proteins of these sarbecoviruses possess an R-A-K-Q motif, which lies only one nucleotide mutation away from a furin cleavage site (FCS) that enhances infectivity in other coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. However, mutating this motif to an FCS does not enable spike cleavage. Overall, while UK sarbecoviruses would require further molecular adaptations to infect humans, their zoonotic risk is unknown and warrants closer surveillance.

Species‐specific responses to landscape configuration and landscape composition have been studied extensively. However, little work has been done to compare intraspecific differences in habitat preferences. Bats have potential as good bioindicator taxa in woodland habitats. Therefore, studying sex differences in responses to woodland and the wider landscape can allow us to gain insight into the relative importance of these habitats for both bats and other taxa. In this study, we aimed to test the predictions that (i) habitat type and connectivity will influence the probability of recording female bats in woodlands and (ii) sex differences in response to habitat type and connectivity will be species‐specific. Bat capture data was collected in 206 woodlands over 3 years in England. The probability of detecting females relative to males was modeled in response to a range of woodland characteristics and landscape metrics for six bat species. We recorded sex differences in responses to landscape features in three species. We found a higher probability of capturing female Myotis nattereri in woodlands that were surrounded by a higher proportion of improved grasslands, whereas female Myotis mystacinus were less likely to be recorded in woodlands surrounded by semi‐natural vegetation. Female Plecotus auritus were more likely to be recorded in isolated woodlands with less connectivity to other woodlands and where agriculture dominated the surrounding landscape. Our findings indicate that sexual segregation occurs across several UK bat species in response to landscape connectivity and composition. Sexual segregation in response to landscape characteristics in bats should therefore be an important consideration in the management of fragmented agricultural landscapes.

The genus Miniopterus is a monophyletic assemblage of many species characterized by remarkably conservative morphology. The number of recognized species has more than doubled over the last two decades, mainly with newly recognized Afrotropical and Malagasy species. A molecular phylogenetic analysis based on cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) revealed a monophyletic clade of Miniopterus from Sri Lanka and southern India that is distinct from the other known taxa of this genus. The mean uncorrected pairwise sequence divergence among the three gene sequences of this new Miniopterus lineage was 0.83% (range 0.4–1.2%) and between this and other sampled taxa was 12.7% (range 8.5–15.9%). This lineage was also distinctive in craniodental morphometrics and hence it is herein described as a new species. The newly described species is easily distinguished by its external and cranial dimensions from its smaller (M. pusillus) and larger (M. magnater) congeners in India and Sri Lanka. It is also somewhat smaller than M. fuliginosus in both external and cranial dimensions. This is the first description of a new Miniopterus species from Asia in six decades and from India and Sri Lanka in eight decades. Our study highlights the importance of using both genetic and morphometric analyses in taxonomic studies on South Asian bats.

Several studies have suggested SARS‐CoV‐2 originated from a viral ancestor in bats, but whether transmission occurred directly or via an intermediary host to humans remains unknown. Concerns of spillover of SARS‐CoV‐2 into wild bat populations are hindering bat rehabilitation and conservation efforts in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Current protocols state that animals cared for by individuals who have tested positive for SARS‐CoV‐2 cannot be released into the wild and must be isolated to reduce the risk of transmission to wild populations. Here, we propose a reverse transcription‐quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT‐qPCR)‐based protocol for detection of SARS‐CoV‐2 in bats, using fecal sampling. Bats from the United Kingdom were tested following suspected exposure to SARS‐CoV‐2 and tested negative for the virus. With current UK and international legislation, the identification of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection in wild animals is becoming increasingly important, and protocols such as the one developed here will help improve understanding and mitigation of SARS‐CoV‐2 in the future.

Abstract Public data archiving (PDA) is widely advocated as a means of achieving open data standards, leading to improved data preservation, increased scientific reproducibility, and transparency, as well as additional data use. Public data archiving was primarily conceived to archive data from short‐term, single‐purpose scientific studies. It is now more widely applied, including to large‐scale citizen science biodiversity recording and monitoring schemes which combine the efforts of volunteers with professional scientists. This may affect the financial security of such schemes by reducing income from data and analytical services. Communication between scheme organizers and researchers may be disrupted, reducing scientific quality and impeding scheme development. It may also have an impact on the participation of some volunteers. Synthesis and applications. In response to the challenges of public data archiving for citizen science biodiversity recording and monitoring schemes, the archive function of scheme organizations should be better recognized by those promoting open data principles. Increased financial support from the public sector or from commercial or academic data users may offset financial risk. Those in favour of public data archiving should do more to facilitate communication between nonscheme users and the originating schemes, while a more flexible approach to data archiving may be required to address potential impacts on volunteer participation.

SummaryPassive acoustic sensing has emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity, especially for echolocating bat species. To better assess bat population trends there is a critical need for accurate, reliable, and open source tools that allow the detection and classification of bat calls in large collections of audio recordings. The majority of existing tools are commercial or have focused on the species classification task, neglecting the important problem of first localizing echolocation calls in audio which is particularly problematic in noisy recordings.We developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) based open-source pipeline for detecting ultrasonic, full-spectrum, search-phase calls produced by echolocating bats (BatDetect). Our deep learning algorithms (CNNFULLand CNNFAST) were trained on full-spectrum ultrasonic audio collected along road-transects across Romania and Bulgaria by citizen scientists as part of the iBats programme and labelled by users ofwww.batdetective.org. We compared the performance of our system to other algorithms and commercial systems on expert verified test datasets recorded from different sensors and countries. As an example application, we ran our detection pipeline on iBats monitoring data collected over five years from Jersey (UK), and compared results to a widely-used commercial system.Here, we show that both CNNFULLand CNNFASTdeep learning algorithms have a higher detection performance (average precision, and recall) of search-phase echolocation calls with our test sets, when compared to other existing algorithms and commercial systems tested. Precision scores for commercial systems were reasonably good across all test datasets (>0.7), but this was at the expense of recall rates. In particular, our deep learning approaches were better at detecting calls in road-transect data, which contained more noisy recordings. Our comparison of CNNFULLand CNNFASTalgorithms was favourable, although CNNFASThad a slightly poorer performance, displaying a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Our example monitoring application demonstrated that our open-source, fully automatic, BatDetect CNNFASTpipeline does as well or better compared to a commercial system with manual verification previously used to analyse monitoring data.We show that it is possible to both accurately and automatically detect bat search-phase echolocation calls, particularly from noisy audio recordings. Our detection pipeline enables the automatic detection and monitoring of bat populations, and further facilitates their use as indicator species on a large scale, particularly when combined with automatic species identification. We release our system and datasets to encourage future progress and transparency.

We would like to report on investigations into suspected white-nose syndrome (WNS) in hibernating bats from two different sites in Somerset. The first cases of WNS were reported in hibernating bats from Hawes Cave near Albany, New York State, USA, in February 2006. WNS has now spread to caves in a

Radio‐tracking was useed to dertermine the foraging behaviour and habitat use of the serotine bat, Eptesicus serotinus, at two roosts in southren England. The basts communted an average of 6.5 km to and from distinct foraging sites and used up ot five sites per night. Serotine foraged in a wide range of habitats and were able to locate and exploit temporary feeding site such as recently mown grass. They foraged regulary arround white streelamps and in alte summer over cattle pasture on which fresh dung was present. Reproductively active females were strongly philopatric to their day‐roost. In contrast, reproductively inactive females, from the same roosts. moved to new day‐roosts up to 10 km from the site of capture. Serotines used thre distinct foraging strategies, short filight, ground feeding, and, predominantly, aerial hawking. Foraging bouts were interpresed with resting phases, with individuals roosting alone on walls of houses or in trees close to foraging sites. It is concluded that serotines are well adapted to an anthropogenic envioronment. They are strongly philopartric to roosts in human habitations, in close proximity to a range of feeding sites wehre they can take advantage of favourarble land amangement practices.