Scientific papers assessing the role of bats as suppressors of agricultural pests

This database is part of the supplementary material of the article entitled "Pest suppression by bats and management strategies to favour it: a global review", published in the journal Biological Reviews. It illustrates the articles assessing the role of bats in agriculture as suppressors of pests insects, located by the first literature search (LS1), and the main information extracted.

Methodology: 

We conducted a first literature search (LS1) in ISI Web of Science of indexed articles and book chapters in English, using the following terms in the TOPIC field (searching both the title and the abstract): ‘agricultur*’, ‘pest’, ‘insect*’ and ‘bat*’ or ‘bats’. The search was performed by C. T.-C. in October 2022 obtaining 173 references, of which only 66 of were considered for the review after checking the whole text. We only included articles directly studying and assessing the effect of bats as pest controllers, either as direct predators of one or several pests (providing or not evidence of predation), evaluating their effect as top predators or quantifying economically their suppressive effect. We excluded any work that only mentioned the potential of bats as insect pest suppressors as an indirect topic of their research. For each of the included studies, we extracted information following a semi-structured questionnaire: (i) the year and country where the study was performed; (ii) the agroecosystem type studied; (iii) the insect pest species detected and the bat species on which the study was focused; (iv) whether predation of bats upon pest species was demonstrated; (v) whether the study demonstrated a top-down effect of bats on that agroecosystem; (vi) whether the benefits of bat ecosystem services were quantified economically, and what methods were used to estimate the economic value of bats as pest suppressors; and (vii) the conservation and management strategies proposed in the articles and their potential application.