Understanding how species respond to climate change is key to informing vulnerability assessments and designing effective conservation strategies, yet research efforts on wildlife responses to climate change fail to deliver a representative overview due to inherent biases. Bats are a species-rich, globally distributed group of organisms that are thought to be particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change because of their high surface-to-volume ratios and low reproductive rates. We systematically reviewed the literature on bat responses to climate change to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge, identify research gaps and biases and highlight future research needs. We found that studies are geographically biased towards Europe, North America and Australia, and temperate and Mediterranean biomes, thus missing a substantial proportion of bat diversity and thermal responses. Less than half of the published studies provide
Miniopterus schreibersii is a cave-dwelling bat species with a wide distribution in the western Palearctic spanning southern and central Europe, North Africa, Anatolia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. We investigated the social structure and its effects on the genetic makeup of this species, using 10 nuclear microsatellite markers and a partial fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Samples were examined from the species' entire circum-Mediterranean range. Local structuring that was previously detected among populations of M. schreibersii using mitochondrial markers was not observed for microsatellite markers, indicating male-biased dispersal for the species. Some support was found for postglacial expansions in Europe, with Anatolia potentially acting as the primary refugium during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). However, support for this hypothesis is not as strong as that previously detected using mitochondrial DNA markers. This is likely due to the diminishing effect of male-mediated dispersal, replenishing the nuclear diversity faster than the mitochondrial diversity in regions that are relatively far from the glacial refugia.
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