The second dataset contains the bat cave geographical location (latitude/longitude) and recorded species (Table 2, Figure 3A). We used the Web of Science and Google Scholar to search online literature, databases, and repositories for published information on cave-dwelling bats from 1990 to 2021. We used the following combination of keywords: (Bat* OR Chiroptera OR Chiroptera fauna*) AND (Diversity OR “Species richness” OR abundance OR distribution OR conservation OR ecology) AND (Cave* OR Cave-dwelling OR Cave-roosting OR underground* OR subterranean OR karst* OR Limestone). We also set a “create alert” in Google Scholar whenever new related papers were published. The data mining process for version 1.0 ended in June 2021. Our search returned 753 papers. We also searched using the Baidu Research engine for Chinese literature and self-archived ResearchGate to maximise search results. To ensure the precision of the datasets included in DarkCideS 1.0, we filtered all published literature to only include those papers or reports with complete species names and geographical records. We contacted corresponding authors with requests to provide us with geographical data when these were missing from their papers or supplementary materials. In the circumstance that we were unable to find the data, and the corresponding author did not respond to our request, that “cave site” was excluded from the database. We converted all species and cave latitude and longitude into WG8 84 decimal degrees with five significant figures. The second dataset of DarkCideS 1.0 contains 6746 georeferenced occurrences for 402 species 17 from 2002 cave sites (Figures 3). Cave sites occur in all continents except Antarctica, with most of the data originating from tropical and temperate biomes (Figure 3B). We have cave records from 46 countries of which China and Brazil have the highest number of caves recorded (Figure 3C).