Echolocation Call Library of South Asian Bats

The advent of non-invasive and passive acoustic monitoring techniques has increased the availability of echolocation data including in highly diverse regions, such as South Asia, where 145 of the 155 extant bat species are known to use laryngeal, nasal, or lingual echolocation. However, information remains disperse with no existing review of the state of echolocation knowledge in this region.

Here we present a review that collates and catalogues echolocation data to facilitate access and reveal general patterns and knowledge gaps. We conducted a systematic review that returned 35 peer-reviewed publications containing echolocation data to which we added ~6,000 unpublished recordings from various collections (including the open-source ChiroVox database). We created a foundational database reporting on six standard echolocation functional traits to be used in identification.