Natural history collections reveal species richness on a small isolated tropical island: the bats of Siberut


SABHRINA GIT A ANI N T A ,S EPHY NOE RFAHMY S IGI T WIANTORO and DJO K O T. I SKANDAR


Abstract The paucity of biodiversity assessments in the Palaeotropics has constrained recommendations for tropi- cal forest conservation in areas such as Siberut, one of the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia known for its high endemic- ity. Taking advantage of information from museum collec- tions amassed from the Indo-Malaya archipelago from the early 20th century onwards, we show how species records available through online databases of natural history collec- tions can be used to assess the state of biodiversity when used in conjunction with a field survey, using bat species on Siberut as a study case. We obtained a total of 15 years of records from 1903 to 2013 (following searches of databas- es up to 2020), documenting 20 bat species on Siberut. Of these, our field survey contributed records of three addition- al species not previously recorded on the island. The species accumulation curve has not levelled off, suggesting that fu- ture surveys may discover additional bat species and high- lighting Siberut’s importance as bat habitat and source of tropical biodiversity.


Keywords Bat, biodiversity assessment, island species, museum collection, online database, Siberut, small island, species richness


Supplementary material for this article is available at doi.org/10.1017/S0030605321001022


tion, and the impact is potentially greater for small islands. One such island is Siberut in the Mentawai archipelago off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, well known for its high number of endemic primates and recognized as a Biosphere Reserve in 1981 (UNESCO, 2015). Logging concessions, how- ever, have been threatening the island’s forests since the late 1990s (Darmanto & Setyowati, 2012), reducing total forest cover and the populations of endemic primates (Whittaker, 2006). In assessing the state of biodiversity on Siberut and similar islands, all available sources of information need to be examined, including from historical expeditions now available through online databases, hereafter referred to as natural history collections (Graham et al., 2004). Siberut has a high density of endemic species relative to


B SABHRINA GITA ANINTA*† (Corresponding author, orcid.org/0000-0002-0736-


4750, sagitaninta@gmail.com) Undergraduate Study Program in Biology, School of Life Sciences and Technology, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Jalan Ganesa 10, Bandung 40132, West Java, Indonesia


SEPHY NOERFAHMY‡ Independent Consultant, West Java, Indonesia SIGIT WIANTORO (


orcid.org/0000-0001-6169-5772) Museum Zoologicum


Bogoriense, Research Center for Biology, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Indonesia


DJOKO T. ISKANDAR§( orcid.org/0000-0002-8923-6081) School of Life Sciences and Technology, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia


*Current address: School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK †Also at: Tambora Muda Indonesia, Bogor, Indonesia ‡Current address: Wildlife Conservation Society Indonesia Program, Bogor, Indonesia §Current address: Basic Sciences Comision, The Indonesian Academy of Sciences, Jakarta, Indonesia


Received 11 December 2020. Revision requested 1 April 2021. Accepted 27 July 2021. First published online 26 May 2022.


its size. The island’s biodiversity is relatively distinct com- pared to adjacent islands (WWF, 1980), possibly a result of its isolation from the Sundaland mainland for the last 500,000 years, even when sea level was at its lowest (Voris, 2000). Conservation recommendations for the island continue to rely on relatively old grey literature (e.g. WWF, 1980) and research published in the early 2000s (e.g. Whittaker, 2005, 2006; Quinten et al., 2010) that focused on primates. There are five types of forest on Siberut, each with unique communities (Meyers et al., 2006; Quinten et al., 2010). Surveying the whole island is challenging. Despite being generally flat with a maximum altitude of 384 m, most of the 4,080 km2 is criss-crossed by meandering watercourses fed by c. 4,000 mm of annual rainfall, with daily temperatures of 22–31 °C and no dry sea- son(WWF, 1980). The humid hills and ridges are difficult to access on foot, and the inhabitants use motorboats to travel by river or along the coast. We collated data from Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense,


early 20th century accounts (Lyon, 1916; Chasen & Kloss, 1927), grey literature (WWF, 1980), systematic reviews (Corbet & Hill, 1992), and online databases that were last updated in 2018, searched in 2020 (Constable et al., 2010; Natural History Museum, 2014; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 2015; Western Australian Museum, 2018; GBIF.org, 2020; Supplementary Table 1). We only included records for which the year was available. Where geographical co- ordinates were not available, we estimated them using an administrative map (Darmanto & Setyowati, 2012)and web portal (GeoNames, 2016).


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution- ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), which permits re-use, distribution, reproduction, transformation, and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited and any transformation/adaptation is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence. Oryx, 2022, 56(6), 904–907 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321001022


iodiversity in areas of emerging economic growth in South-east Asia is under threat from habitat degrada-


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