Integrating Bioacoustics and Community Science for Advancing Bat Research: Insights From Urban–Rural Landscapes Across Regions in Peru

In the tropics, rapid urbanization, scarce research, and limited resources for studying bats constrain conservation efforts, positioning community science as a practical approach to address these challenges. This study presents the first integration of community science and passive acoustic monitoring for bat research in the Neotropics, implemented across urban and rural landscapes of the Peruvian Coast, Andes, and Amazon to investigate bat community structure and environmental responses. Using low‐cost AudioMoth recorders, 140 sampling sites were selected by volunteer participants and evaluated between 2020 and 2024. We conducted comparative analyses of bat communities between urban and rural areas, assessed environmental drivers of richness and activity, and compared participatory outcomes with traditional expert‐led research. This community science project documented 32 species from five families, including new local records. Across all regions, urban bat communities consistently exhibited molossid acoustic dominance and moderate‐to‐high dissimilarity from rural communities. Artificial light at night was negatively associated with both species richness and acoustic activity. Richness also declined with increased urban cover, while activity showed region‐specific responses to vegetation. Comparisons with expert‐led research in one of the examined localities, Lima, showed that community science data reliably represented activity patterns of Promops davisoni and Tadarida brasiliensis . However, community‐level occupancy was higher in expert‐led surveys, although both approaches showed a similar positive association between Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and occupancy. Overall, our findings demonstrate that collaboration between scientists and communities is particularly promising for ecological bat research in the tropics, generating relevant data in socially and logistically challenging contexts that limit conservation efforts in our region.