Climate change is predicted to drive geographical range shifts that will result in changes in species diversity and functional composition and have potential repercussions for ecosystem functioning. However, the effect of these changes on species composition and functional diversity (FD) remains unclear, especially for mammals, specifically bats. We used species distribution models and a comprehensive ecological and morphometr...

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 macroecology. We provide global range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal spec...

Aim The impact of Pleistocene climatic oscillations on tropical biomes is associated with changes in the extent of forest cover. Fruit bats have played a role in woodland dynamics via pollination and seed dispersal. We hypothesized that phylogeographic patterns of Rousettus on continental Africa and adjacent islands should show a signature of pluvial‐drought cycles, involving demographic expansions and contractions. Location A...

The discovery of new species of mammals in Europe is a rare event, but owing to recent progress in genetic methods used to survey current biodiversity, such discoveries have been accumulating during the last decades. The naming of these new taxa has important bearings in conservation, as this is the first step needed for them to be recognised by the scientific community but also legally. The naming of new animal species, howev...

Recently, several species of aerial‐hawking bats have been found to prey on migrating songbirds, but details on this behaviour and its relevance for bird migration are still unclear. We sequenced avian DNA in feather‐containing scats of the bird‐feeding bat Nyctalus lasiopterus from Spain collected during bird migration seasons. We found very high prey diversity, with 31 bird species from eight families of Passeriformes, almos...

The contemporary distribution and genetic composition of biodiversity bear a signature of species’ evolutionary histories and the effects of past climatic oscillations. For many European species, the Mediterranean peninsulas of Iberia, Italy and the Balkans acted as glacial refugia and the source of range recolonization, and as a result, they contain disproportionately high levels of diversity. As these areas are particularly...

With rates of climate change exceeding the rate at which many species are able to shift their range or adapt, it is important to understand how future changes are likely to affect biodiversity at all levels of organisation. Understanding past responses and extent of niche conservatism in climatic tolerance can help predict future consequences. We use an integrated approach to determine the genetic consequences of past and futu...

Integrative taxonomy aims to document biodiversity by incorporating all useful characters to increase confidence in hypotheses about phylogenetic relationships. In this study, we combine data obtained independently from morphology, two maternally inherited mt DNA genes and two biparentally inherited nu DNA genes to make phylogenetic and taxonomic hypotheses about the Palaearctic members of the bat genus E ptesicus ( V espertil...

The demographic history of Rhinolophus hipposideros (lesser horseshoe bat) was reconstructed across its European, North African and Middle‐Eastern distribution prior to, during and following the most recent glaciations by generating and analysing a multimarker data set. This data set consisted of an X‐linked nuclear intron (Bgn; 543 bp), mitochondrial DNA (cytb‐ tRNA ‐control region; 1630 bp) and eight variable microsatellite...

Aim The role of glacial refugia in the biogeographical patterns in the Western Palaearctic region has been widely discussed, but many questions remain unresolved. We examined the biogeography, genetic diversity, spatial distribution and evolutionary history of the Myotis nattereri bat species complex to investigate the presence of multiple refugia and the persistence of Quaternary differentiation between and within Mediterrane...