Species distribution data
There are 151 recognized bat species in South Asia (Srinivasulu et al.,
2023) but we a priori excluded the four species endemic to the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands given the geographic isolation of the
islands from the rest of the South Asian landmass. Species were
identified based on current taxonomic information at the time of
analysis (Srinivasulu et al., 2021). We also limited our study to
species for which we could gather five or more occurrence localities
across South Asia, with a minimum distance between occurrences of 5 km.
Presence-only occurrence data for these species were collected from
published (including but not limited to Bates & Harrison, 1997;
Srinivasulu & Srinivasulu, 2012; Srinivasulu et al., 2021; Raman et
al., 2023), unpublished sources (records collected during field surveys
conducted in India between 2002 and 2022, and records communicated by
collaborators and citizen scientists in the region confirmed by
photographic or other evidence), and GBIF records [accessed July
2022]. Records of specimens housed in museums including the Natural
History Museum (London, UK), Harrison Institute (Sevenoaks, United
Kingdom), Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA), Zoological
Survey of India (Kolkata, India), and Natural History Museum, Osmania
University (Hyderabad, India), were also included.
To define current localities, we omitted occurrence records collected
before 1980 and only included records collected between 1980 and 1999 if
presence was confirmed during field surveys conducted by the authors
from 2000. In order to account for spatial bias in sampling and spatial
autocorrelation between occurrences, points were spatially rarefied to
the resolution of the climate data (2.5 arc-minutes). Duplicate records
within the same cell were omitted from the analysis using random removal
of nearest neighbours implemented in the spThin package
(Aiello-Lammens et al., 2015) in R 4.3.0 (R Core Team, 2022). After
processing, occurrence data were available for 110 bat species
representing all nine families recognized in South Asia, for which we
obtained a total of 5998 occurrence points. Data availability varied
among species, with occurrences ranging from five points for six species
(Coelops frithii , Kerivoula lenis , K. malpasi ,Murina leucogaster , M. pluvialis , and Myotis
annectans ) to 439 points for Pteropus medius .