Species distribution data
There are 151 recognized bat species in South Asia (Srinivasulu et al., 2023) but we a priori excluded the four species endemic to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands given the geographic isolation of the islands from the rest of the South Asian landmass. Species were identified based on current taxonomic information at the time of analysis (Srinivasulu et al., 2021). We also limited our study to species for which we could gather five or more occurrence localities across South Asia, with a minimum distance between occurrences of 5 km. Presence-only occurrence data for these species were collected from published (including but not limited to Bates & Harrison, 1997; Srinivasulu & Srinivasulu, 2012; Srinivasulu et al., 2021; Raman et al., 2023), unpublished sources (records collected during field surveys conducted in India between 2002 and 2022, and records communicated by collaborators and citizen scientists in the region confirmed by photographic or other evidence), and GBIF records [accessed July 2022]. Records of specimens housed in museums including the Natural History Museum (London, UK), Harrison Institute (Sevenoaks, United Kingdom), Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA), Zoological Survey of India (Kolkata, India), and Natural History Museum, Osmania University (Hyderabad, India), were also included.
To define current localities, we omitted occurrence records collected before 1980 and only included records collected between 1980 and 1999 if presence was confirmed during field surveys conducted by the authors from 2000. In order to account for spatial bias in sampling and spatial autocorrelation between occurrences, points were spatially rarefied to the resolution of the climate data (2.5 arc-minutes). Duplicate records within the same cell were omitted from the analysis using random removal of nearest neighbours implemented in the spThin package (Aiello-Lammens et al., 2015) in R 4.3.0 (R Core Team, 2022). After processing, occurrence data were available for 110 bat species representing all nine families recognized in South Asia, for which we obtained a total of 5998 occurrence points. Data availability varied among species, with occurrences ranging from five points for six species (Coelops frithii , Kerivoula lenis , K. malpasi ,Murina leucogaster , M. pluvialis , and Myotis annectans ) to 439 points for Pteropus medius .