Understanding the macroecology of bats

New paper out now in the Journal of Biogeography led by Julian Oeser, together with the Macroecology Lab at University of Potsdam and many others.

We show how innovative SDMs can shed new light on relationships between niches, distributions, competition, and richness.

Using a large dataset for 49 species, we found that high bat richness is not clearly associated with specialization and that geographic exclusion between overlapping species is strongest among specialists. Range sizes decreased with richness despite higher niche breadths and lower exclusion.

See the full paper here: Oeser, J., Zurell, D., Mayer, F., Çoraman, E., Toshkova, N., Deleva, S., Natradze, I., Benda, P., Dietz, C., Georgiakakis, P., Levin, E., Dolev, A., Dundarova, H., Ghazaryan, A., Irmak, S., Hasanov, N., Guliyeva, G., Gritsina, M., Bukhnikashvili, A. and Kuemmerle, T. (2025), Variations of Environmental Niche Breadth, Range Sizes and Geographic Exclusion With Bat Species Richness. Journal of Biogeography Early View, e15125.