Africa and Latin America support over 40% of the world’s bats. The bats in these two continents face similar threats such as roost destruction, habitat loss and degradation, and misunderstood “culling” campaigns. Latin America has made significant progress in protecting bats through the creation of the Latin American Network for Bat Conservation (RELCOM) and initiatives that include bat courses, student exchanges, species identification, educational programs, and the establishment of conservation areas. In Africa, however, the lack of local expertise has hampered bat conservation efforts.

JRS investments in bat conservation include a 2012 grant to the Field Museum of National History to document Kenya’s bat fauna, and a 2017 grant to the Institute of Ecology at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for bat acoustic monitoring. This project builds upon these previous investments and establishes the Global South Bat Network (GSB) for the conservation of bats in countries of the Global South, and the first bat course to connect African and Latin American students.  The First Bat Course on Ecology, Diversity, Conservation, and Ecosystem Services was held in Diani, Kenya, in January 2020 as a first step in developing an African platform for bats based on successes in Latin America.

The GSB addresses challenges in bat research and conservation by joining forces to generate a deeper understanding of the common threats affecting bats worldwide, and to increase actions towards their protection. The goals of the GSB are to share knowledge with the public and scientific community, work together to find solutions to common environmental challenges, and form a common agenda and collective actions to ensure the conservation of bats in countries of the Global South. This course is the first step in generating critical data on Global South bat species and developing a data-sharing portal to support these goals. Course participants attended lectures, practical sessions, and field trips covering topics on bat taxonomy, sampling and monitoring techniques, ecosystem services, threats, disease ecology, behavior, morphology, evolution, genetics, science communication, outreach, fundraising and grant writing. Sampling nights during the course aimed to generate data records for Kenyan bats and mobilize data through a Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) portal. Capacity building was also enhanced through communication and engagement with local communities.

1. Airfare for African students.
2. Lodging and meals for students from Latin American and Africa.
3. Maintenance of the KWS data portal for two years.
4. G suite network management for two years.

This training course contributed to the understanding of Africa’s unique biodiversity through the generation of high-quality data, by growing the number of African bat conservationists, and by encouraging collaboration among countries. This project is expected to bring bats and ecosystem services into the spotlight, leading to additional studies, conservation measures, and course replication in other countries of the Global South. In the long-term, GSB is expected to enhance knowledge of understudied bat species, potentially describing new species, and minimize or reverse the main threats affecting bats and their habitat in the Global South. The next steps for the GSB include future joint publications, parallel research projects, shared conservation strategies, additional meetings, and incorporating Asia into the network.

1. The GSB was established and GSB’s vision, mission, objectives, and initial projects were identified.
2. Eight professors and 26 students from 22 countries across Latin America and Africa participated in the course.
3. Data was collected from over 200 individual bats during ten days of acoustic monitoring on the coast of Diani, Kenya, resulting in the identification of 23 species and collection of over 50 hours of echolocation calls and over 100,000 acoustic data records, which will be used to build an acoustic library of African bats.
4. Six team projects were conducted that focused on ecomorphology, acoustics, and science communication.
5. Outreach activities included the creation of fact sheets for each of the captured bat species, curated release calls for an acoustic library, and the very first bat social community platform to encourage discussion and collaboration across continents.

The collaborative effort highlights the importance of standardizing research techniques to better study and conserve bats and showed the participants that Africa and Latin America are more similar than they had previously thought. The course focused on student interaction and team building activities to encourage friendships and future collaborations. Students co-led the creation of the network to build a sense of belonging and ownership. The course dynamics fostered friendships and plans for research collaborations. The course itself was a main axis of the creation of the network, but the fieldwork and extracurricular activities promoted the initiation of a network that appears poised for growth.

Prof. Paul Webala is a National Geographic Explorer, published author, and a senior lecturer of wildlife biology at Maasai Mara University, Kenya. He is a regional expert on small mammals, especially bats, with extensive fieldwork experience. He is primarily a community ecologist, although his research addresses a variety of important questions for improving bat conservation in Africa. His research also spans several subfields of biology, with work that examines behavioral, ecological, and systematic/taxonomic questions.

Bats are remarkable animals and are often misunderstood for their association with myth and contemporary fears of zoonotic diseases.  We are pleased to support this training workshop that directly follows from our earlier investments in Kenya and Mexico. Professional networks are the key to capacity development and we hope this collaboration will strengthen ties and serve bat biodiversity conservation in all the partner countries. We look forward to hearing about the collaborations that result from the students’ interactions.