As a nocturnal species, bats are notoriously hard to spot, so acoustics have always played a major role in monitoring bat populations. However, distinguishing between different bat calls is very difficult and we have developed a new online classification tool which automatically classifies bat calls to species. The tool currently works for 34 European bat species and is the first standardised automatic bat identification tool that can be used across a continent.
Publication: Walters, C. L., Freeman, R., Collen, A., Dietz, C., Brock Fenton, M., Jones, G., Obrist, M. K., Puechmaille, S. J., Sattler, ., Siemers, B. M., Parsons, S., Jones, K. E. (2012), A continental-scale tool for acoustic identification of European bats. Journal of Applied Ecology, 49: 1064–1074. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02182.x Online tool here
Media coverage: NYTimes BBCNews
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