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Aim  Urbanization is a dominant demographic trend throughout the world that involves massive habitat alterations. Understanding how urbanization affects biota is a crucial prerequisite for development and application of effective species conservation programmes. Our study focuses on Neotropical high flying aerial insectivorous bats, an ecologically important, but so far seriously understudied group of vertebrates.

Location  Panama.

Methods  Using acoustic monitoring, we assessed and compared species occurrence, composition and activity of aerial insectivorous bats at three site categories located on the isthmus in Panama: forest, urban areas and a forest–town interface.

Results  In 2 years of field work, we recorded 44,744 bat passes over the microphone and identified a total of 25 aerial insectivorous bat species. Species richness was highest in the forest, decreased towards the forest–town interface …