Importance of the integrated use of bioacoustics and mist nets for bat surveys

In Brazil, bat diversity surveys are usually carried out using only mist nets, where studies applying acoustic monitoring are scarce. Our aim was to analyse the complementarity of two survey methods, mist nets (MN) and acoustic monitoring (AM), to assess the bat diversity in forest remnants in the metropolitan region of João Pessoa (MRJP) in the state of Paraíba. With a total sampling effort of 1,443 minutes of recordings and 55,580 h.m² of nets, we recorded 28 species from five families. Four species were recorded exclusively by AM, 14 only by MN and ten using both methods. The similarity analysis revealed that the composition of bat species differed between methods (ANOSIM: r² = 0.9684; <i>p</i> &lt; 0.01). The complementarity of the used methods indicates that AM added between 16% and 50% of new records to the total richness of each fragment. The percentage of occurrence suggests that common species in the recordings had not yet been documented or had a low number of records by MN. The integrated use of these two methods produced a more comprehensive picture of bat species richness in the study areas. These methods would not reveal the real diversity of bat species if applied singularly.