Alice Hughes

and 4 more

Krizler C. Tanalgo

and 1 more

Wildlife-watching and ecotourism are effective approaches for improving public attitudes and raising awareness of wildlife conservation. However, the ability of wildlife tourism to enhance the conservation of less appealing taxa such as bats has rarely been examined. We sampled a total of 197 tourists in Monfort Bat Cave Sanctuary in the Philippines, the world’s largest colony of Geoffroy's Rousette (Rousettus amplexicaudatus). Convenient pre/post-visit surveys were conducted to (a) explore the potential of bat-watching to raise tourists’ knowledge, attitudes towards bats, and determine how perceptions vary across demographic classes; and (b) determine potential predictors of conservation willingness among sampled urban tourists. Our study observed an increase in knowledge about bats and 61% of the tourists are willing to support conservation bat protection after the bat-watching visit to the cave site. Tourists’ conservation willingness was associated with age group, prior knowledge of bat ecosystem services, and perceptions about the conservation relevance of bat-watching as a conservation initiative. Our study highlights the effectiveness of short-term engagements such as bat-watching at improving human-bat interactions and suggests such programs should focus on highlighting ecosystem services and benefits of bats. However, it should be noted that we performed this study before the COVID-19 global pandemic and misinformation linking bats to the disease spread has increased since. We expect that public perception will change in the post-COVID-19 period and the conservation willingness survey should be repeated to understand how to counter misconceptions to develop effective bat conservation management in the post-COVID-19.This manuscript is accepted in Environmental Challenges

Alice Hughes

and 3 more

Understanding patterns of biodiversity is crucial for developing appropriate conservation and management plans. The IUCN RedList is looked upon as a source of globally-consistent assessment of species extinction risk, including range maps as part of the extinction risk assessment. Species ranges are a central criterion in determining extinction vulnerability, and consequently apportioning conservation and research efforts. Thus, the accuracy of these maps is crucial to the effective conservation of global biodiversity. Given difficulties in acquiring sufficient, reliable point data and the need for species or diversity maps within many studies, countless papers rely on these centralized expert range maps. However, such efforts are vulnerable to errors if not carefully checked, and the drive to assess as many species as possible rather than to ensure meaningful quality assessment may drive high error rates, with huge implications for species conservation. Recent efforts to account for the over-generalization of species ranges by trimming species ranges with landcover and elevation also makes a number of assumptions on the consistency and accuracy of global data, the lack of politically-driven biases. Here, we analyse the biases present in 50768 animal IUCN and BirdLife maps and provide suggestions on how such analyses could be improved, and flag spatial and taxonomic inconsistencies to enable analysis to acknowledge the limitations of data in further analysis based on these maps. We also discuss effective ways to overcome these biases, the limits of such applications and explore alternative means of mapping diversity patterns.