Victor Van Cakenberghe

• PhD
• University of Antwerp

This report is a yearly update about our knowledge of African bats.

This appendix contains abstracts of papers dealing with African bats.

Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of...

Assessing how bats respond to habitat attributes requires an integrative approach to reliably predict direct community‐level effects. We focused on hipposiderid and pteropodid bats because of their diverse resource use patterns, body size ranges, and dispersal abilities. We combined an array of bat species‐level characteristics with key forest stan...

Bats exhibit a variety of life-history traits that can serve as valuable surrogate metrics of terrestrial ecosystem health. Here, we investigate how sonotype activity of hipposiderid bats covaries with habitat structure at finer spatial scales. We recorded passive echolocation calls and measured key habitat attributes in six rainforests in the Loma...

Many tropical biosphere reserves face the problem of overexploiting biological resources, which is a major cause of biodiversity loss. We used an integrative approach, combining camera trapping and bat trapping in diverse habitats over multiple surveys in Yangambi Biosphere Reserve, Democratic Republic of the Congo. We investigated whether species-...

Abiotic factors are usually considered key drivers of species distribution at macro scales, while biotic interactions are mostly used at local scales. A few studies have explored the role of biotic interactions at macro scales, but all considered a limited number of species and obligate interactions. We examine the role of biotic interactions in la...

Although bats carry out important beneficial ecological and agricultural functions such as pollination and dispersion of seeds, they often carry dangerous diseases. This is worrying because of the increased dependency of the urban populations in Kisangani on bats as a source of animal proteins. The straw-coloured fruit bat (Eidolon helvum) is one o...

Aim Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroecolo...

The purpose of the African Chiroptera Report is to collate published information on, and collate specimen records of, African bats. The advent of the internet provides an opportunity for large amounts of information to be easily and economically updated and accessible, which is particularly important for taxonomic information. The electronic, web-b...

The purpose of the African Chiroptera Report is to collate published information on, and collate specimen records of, African bats. The advent of the internet provides an opportunity for large amounts of information to be easily and economically updated and accessible, which is particularly important for taxonomic information. The electronic, web-b...

The purpose of the African Chiroptera Report is to collate published information on, and collate specimen records of, African bats. The advent of the internet provides an opportunity for large amounts of information to be easily and economically updated and accessible, which is particularly important for taxonomic information. The electronic, web-b...

The list below gives a taxonomical overview of the taxa covered in this report. The order in which these taxa are presented is alphabetically sorted on the hierarchical categories from high (order) to low (subspecies).

The purpose of the African Chiroptera Report is to collate published information on, and collate specimen records of, African bats. The advent of the internet provides an opportunity for large amounts of information to be easily and economically updated and accessible, which is particularly important for taxonomic information. The electronic, web-b...

Animals partition their daily activities based on a variety of internal and external factors. For insectivorous bats, the availability of prey, weather conditions, moonlight and reproductive energy demands are proposed as the major influencers of temporal activity. This study investigated the temporal variation in activity of the subtropical cave-d...

Clockwise from top, lateral, ventral and dorsal skull images of type specimens. The squares of the graph paper are 2 mm wide.

This 2017 issue provides an update to the current knowledge of African bats.

The list below gives a taxonomical overview of the taxa covered in this report. The order in which these taxa are presented is alphabetically sorted on the hierarchical categories from high (order) to low (subspecies).

ACR taxon-the taxon names as used in the current African Chiroptera Report. # ind.: the number of individuals used to record echolocation from, if indicated the number recorded in different contexts is shown, and what sex and age (j. = juvenile, a. = adult, f = female, m = male) the individuals where. # calls: the number of calls on which the analy...

In 1966, Robert William Hayman, Xavier Misonne and Walter Verheyen published their listing of the Congolese, Rwandan and Burundian bat specimens in the collections in the museums of Tervuren, Brussels, Geneva, London and New York. In the fifty years that have passed since, some major changes have been introduced in the taxonomy of the Chiroptera: n...

Although bats carry out important beneficial ecological and agricultural functions such as pollination and dispersion of seeds, they often carry dangerous diseases. This is worrying because of the increased dependency of the urban populations in Kisangani on bats as a source of animal proteins. The straw-coloured fruit bat (Eidolon helvum) is one o...

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009;...

This plot is not part of the published stance but derives from it. The plot shows the number of authors by geographic region (courtesy of Dr. Diego Astua).