Victor Van Cakenberghe

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 large‐scale SDMs by testing two main hypotheses: (1) biotic factors in SDMs can have an important role at continental scale; (2) the inclusion of biotic factors in large‐scale SDMs is important also for generalist species. We used a maximum entropy algorithm to model the distribution of 177 bat species in Africa calibrating two SDMs for each species: one considering only abiotic variables (noBIO‐SDMs) and the other (BIO‐SDMs) including also biotic variables (trophic resource richness). We focused the interpretation of our results on variable importance and response curves. For each species, we also compared the potential distribution measuring the percentage of change between the two models in each pixel of the study area. All models gave AUC >0.7, with values on average higher in BIO‐SDMs compared to noBIO‐SDMs. Trophic resources showed an importance overall higher level than all abiotic predictors in most of the species (~68%), including generalist species. Response curves were highly interpretable in all models, confirming the ecological reliability of our models. Model comparison between the two models showed a change in potential distribution for more than 80% of the species, particularly in tropical forests and shrublands. Our results highlight the importance of considering biotic interactions in SDMs at macro scales. We demonstrated that a generic biotic proxy can be important for modeling species distribution when species‐specific data are not available, but we envision that a multi‐scale analysis combined with a better knowledge of the species might provide a better understanding of the role of biotic interactions.

Bat surveys in 20 Protected Areas (PAs) of Nepal are sporadic and/or had targeted purposively a few localities, therefore, bat diversity from the PAs is yet to be explored. Bat species richness in PAs from two reviews until 2011 are inconsistent. In total, seven surveys have been undertaken in six P…

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are a cornerstone of climate change conservation research but temporal extrapolations into future climate scenarios cannot be verified until later this century. One way of assessing the robustness of projections is to compare their consistency between different mod…

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is a pervasive form of pollution largely affecting wildlife, from individual behaviour to community structure and dynamics. As nocturnal mammals, bats are often adversely affected by ALAN, yet some “light-opportunistic” species exploit it by hunting insects swarming …

Understanding seasonal variation in the distribution and movement patterns of migratory species is essential to monitoring and conservation efforts. While there are many species of migratory bats in North America, little is known about their seasonal movements. In terms of conservation, this is impo…

Climate change is among the key anthropogenic factors affecting species’ distribution, with important consequences for conservation. However, little is known concerning the consequences of distributional changes on community‐level interactions, and responses by generalist species might have many eco…

Species distribution data are fundamental to the understanding of biodiversity patterns and processes. Yet, such data are strongly affected by sampling biases, mostly related to site accessibility. The understanding of these biases is therefore crucial in systematics, biogeography and conservation. …

Natural history specimens are widely used across ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation. Although biological sex may influence all of these areas, it is often overlooked in large-scale studies using museum specimens. If collections are biased towards one sex, studies may not be representativ…

The continental and marine territories of Uruguay are characterised by a rich convergence of multiple biogeographic ecoregions of the Neotropics, making this country a peculiar biodiversity spot. However, despite the biological significance of Uruguay for the South American subcontinent, the distrib…

Located at the crossroad of the Palearctic, Saharo-Arabian, and Oriental zoogeographic realms, and with its great environmental diversity, Iran harbors a high complexity and richness of fauna and flora. Knowledge about the Iranian mammal fauna has greatly increased over recent years thanks to the gr…