Interactions between bats and agricultural insect pests worlwide

This database illustrates the interactions between bats and agricultural insect pests detected conducting a systematic review in October 2022, entitled "Pest suppression by bats and management strategies to favour it: a global review", to be published in the journal Biological Reviews.

Methodology applied:

We compiled a comprehensive list of agricultural insect pests occurring in temperate and tropical regions. Since no more recent public documents or published lists were available, we extracted the main agricultural insect pests cited in Hill (1983, 1987). Note that species might be considered pests in certain regions while not in others, meaning that this comprehensive list will need careful review by entomologists and local or regional experts for use in agricultural management.

We assembled a first list of 1,237 insect pest species or genera extracted from Hill (1987, 1983). We then conducted a literature search in the ISI Web of Science using the R package wosr. We searched for any indexed document containing the following terms in the topic field: "pest species name" AND "bat*", where ‘pest species name’ refers to each of the 1237  species. After the first check of the articles found, we added 562 new pest species to the first list, which were not included in Hill (1987, 1983), but were mentioned in the papers found. Thus, the updated list consisting of 1799 insect pest species was used again to perform the same literature search with the R package wosr. In addition, we also performed three literature searches including the following terms: (i) "bat" or "bats", "diet*", and "insect*"; (ii) "bat" or "bats", "predat*", and "insect*"; (iii) "bat" or "bats", "diet*", and "arthropod*". We identified a total of 1125 articles, of which we retained only those that identified bat prey at the genus or species level (N = 95).

Predator - prey interactions were extracted from the articles reviewed and added in this data set, showing each bat species with the insect pest species it consumed, as well as the method used to confirm predation.