Overview of bat species reported in Albania with the first country records for eight species

Abstract

The bat fauna of Albania, a country located in a Balkan glacial refugium and a Mediterranean biodiversity hotspot, has remained poorly studied although as many as 21 species and representatives of three species complexes had been reported before 2003. It was expected that several new species would be added to the country’s list of fauna, not only due to their occurrence in adjacent regions but to the splitting of already known taxa into sibling species and the discovery of new, cryptic species. Altogether, we recorded 32 bat species in Albania, including all of those previously reported (21) and 11 new species for the country, as a result of field work conducted in 2003–2012. Here, we report on eight bat species including Rhinolophus mehelyi, Nyctalus lasiopterus, Plecotus kolombatovici, Barbastella barbastellus, Myotis brandtii that had not been reported previously in Albania while three species (Pipistrellus pipistrellus, Plecotus austriacus, Myotis mystacinus) had been reported before changes to their taxonomy and so could be treated only as representatives of a particular species complex (i.e. sensu lato). We greatly extended the known geographic ranges of five species in the south of Europe.

Keywords:

• Balkans
• biodiversity hotspot
• Chiroptera
• distribution
• species checklist

Acknowledgements

We thank Paulina Jenkins (NHM London) for information about museum specimens of P. kuhlii, Andreas Kiefer for confirmation of our identification of the Plecotus bats as well as Petr Benda and Irek Ruczyński for providing some difficult-to-access literature. We are indebted to Elvana Ramaj (Albanian Ministry of Environment) and Tine Meyer-Cords (UNEP/EUROBATS) for their kind collaboration. The English of the manuscript was improved by American Journal Experts (AJE). Field work was supported by the EUROBATS Projects Initiative in 2010–2011.