The agony of choice: Species richness and range size in the determination of hotspots for the conservation of phyllostomid bats

Abstract

Area-based strategies for conservation include defining species richness and rarity hotspots. However, excluding vulnerable species (e.g., with restricted distribution and categorized as threatened), in establishing such hotspots may limit their representativeness, so the convenience of asserting them has been widely debated. To inform conservation assessments for the New World leaf-nosed bats (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae), we identified hotspots based simultaneously on species richness and rarity of 214 species. We projected species range maps on a 0.5° × 0.5° longitude-latitude grid, from which we built a presence-absence matrix with 6951 sites. Using range-diversity plots, we described richness-rarity hotspots (sites with high species richness and presence of rare species) and poorness-rarity hotspots (with low species richness and presence of rare species). We assess the representativeness of the hotspots within established protected areas using the World Database on Protected Areas. The richness-rarity hotspot was located in the Andean zone from Peru to Panama within which 46 species of phyllostomid bats are distributed and 37% of its surface is protected. While the poorness-rarity hotspot was located in the northern region of Mexico and the Caribbean with 50 phyllostomid bats species and 19% of its surface protected. We hope that our analysis represents a relevant tool for the conservation of phyllostomid bats, which provide several ecosystem services and are currently facing different threats derived from anthropogenic activities.