The Western Asia Bat Research Network (WAB-Net) project

EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a global non-profit organization dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health, formed the Western Asia Bat Research Network (WAB-Net, “wah-bee-net”) in collaboration with key regional stakeholders in Western Asia in 2017. The WAB-Net project was created to strengthen research capacity and knowledge of the diversity and distribution of bat species in a understudied region (Phelps et al., 2019). Over a four-year period (2018–2022), we documented 4,278 occurrence records for 40 bat species using a cross-sectional survey approach at 50 sites in seven Western Asian countries, specifically Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Jordan, Oman, Pakistan, and Türkiye.