La bioacústica como herramienta para el estudio de los murciélagos en el neotrópico: estado de conocimiento y desafíos de investigación

Abstract

The study of acoustic signals of bats, besides being a fundamental monitoring tool, strengthens their taxonomic identification, the knowledge of their distribution, ecology, behavior and conservation. This review presents an analysis of the bioacoustic studies of bats developed in the Neotropics in the last decade (2010-2020) in order to describe the main trends in this field of research, highlight the advances that have been made and identify the main challenges and challenges in their implementation for the development of bioacoustic research of Neotropical bats. The review was performed from search engines and specialized journals using keywords such as: "Acoustics" "Biouacoustic" "Bat" "Chiroptera" "Neotropic" "Echolocation". In total 257 results were obtained, the main research trend in bioacoustics was ecology and the countries with more publications were Brazil and Mexico. It is evident that bioacoustics focused on solving bat research questions is a field of growing interest and of great potential for the development of monitoring programs in the Neotropics, which highlights the need for collaborative and multidisciplinary work, in addition to the publication and automation of the results of each project developed in this field in order to enrich existing data libraries and strengthen new tools for the identification of bat species.