As a result of Romania’s accession to the European Union in 2007 and the expansion of the Natura 2000 protected area network, the amount of data about the local bat fauna has grown rapidly in the last 10-15 years. Concrete bat conservation projects implemented by several NGOs also contributed a significant amount of professional observations. However, despite the fact that in many cases it would facilitate decision-making (e.g. in the case of infrastructure or energy projects), it would help to accurately determine the conservation status of bat species (e.g. in country reports for Article 17. of the Habitats Directive), or when designating new protected areas, there is no comprehensive and modern online database. And in many cases, existing interfaces / summaries accept incorrect data without critical analysis.

In this context the EPI project funded in 2023 started the creation of an online database of all publicly available bat data, and this effort was later joined by colleagues from the Republic of Moldova, where there is also no such platform. Our efforts were also underlined by the need to update the distribution maps of bat species for the 2nd edition of the European Atlas of Mammals, a benchmark work in this field. At the moment the database is ready for launch, and accessing it, viewing maps and data, querying, will require user registration. The official launch is planned for autumn 2024.

Read more on the lilieci.ro portal at https://lilieci.ro/en/news/chirohub-the-database-of-romanian-and-moldova...