AMPlifying bat monitoring across North America: an online portal shares acoustic data to advance bat conservation across the continent

Abstract

Each year, wildlife biologists deploy thousands of echolocation detectors to monitor bat activity and find out what species are present at a site. But pulling these results together in a single place could help us learn more about broader scale patterns of bat activity and their seasonal movements.  A new tool, the Bat Acoustic Monitoring Visualization Tool (https://visualize.batamp.databasin.org/), helps to do just that.  Since its inception in 2013, users have contributed over 200,000 nights of detector data to BatAMP resulting in an unprecedented collection of results that allows users to track when and where species are detected across the U.S. and Canada. Through ongoing data uploads by a growing set of contributors as well as a planned integration to visualize acoustic data generated via the North American Bat Monitoring Program, this tool will greatly expand our understanding of the seasonal occurrence of bats and how those may change over time.

Citation

Weller, Theodore J.; Ward, Brendan C. 2020 AMPlifying bat monitoring across North America: an online portal shares acoustic data to advance bat conservation across the continent. The Wildlife Professional. 14(3): 44-48.