In China, many SCoVrCs were previously detected in several horseshoe bat species, including Rhinolophus sinicus, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (currently R. nippon)16, Rhinolophus macrotis (currently R. episcopus)16, Rhinolophus pearsoni, and Rhinolophus pusillus, and it has been shown that they circulate not only among conspecific bats from the same colony, but also between bat species inhabiting the same caves17,20,21. The ecological niche predicted for bat SCoVrCs using a data set of 19 points (see online supplementary Table S2) is shown in Fig. 4. The AUC was 0.81. The value was > 95% CI null-model’s AUCs (0.68), indicating that the model performs significantly better than a random model (see online supplementary Fig. S1). The highest probabilities of occurrence (highlighted in green in Fig. 4) were found in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, northeastern India, northern Myanmar, northern Vietnam, most regions of China south of the Yellow River, Taiwan, North and South Korea, and southern Japan.
Figure 4 Ecological niche of bat viruses related to SARS-CoV (SCoVrCs). The geographic distribution of suitable environments was predicted using the Maxent algorithm in ENMTools (see “Methods” section for details). AUC = 0.81. Black circles indicate localities used to build the distribution model (see geographic coordinates in online supplementary Table S2).