Research Highlights

Summary

North American bats face unprecedented risks from continuing and emerging threats, but until the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) was established, there were no nation-wide programs for monitoring bat populations.

A new Forest Service report titled A Plan for the North American Bat Monitoring Program, or NABat, provides the details needed for interested groups, agencies, and the public to start monitoring and contributing data to the centralized database. The lead author of the report is Susan Loeb, a research ecologist at the Forest Service”s Southern Research Station Upland Hardwoods Unit.

NABat will use four approaches to gather monitoring data: hibernaculum counts made of bat populations in caves and mines in winter; counts of bats in maternity colonies in summer; mobile acoustic surveys along road transects; and, acoustic surveys at stationary points.

The plan provides guidelines for each approach, including how and when to estimate clusters of bats for population counts in caves, how to locate maternity colonies, how to collect acoustic data and identify bat species from calls recorded on detectors, how to minimize environmental impacts from monitoring, and much more.

In addition to the chapters on monitoring methods, the report includes detailed chapters on the sampling design, the database management system, and statistical approaches that can be used to analyze the data collected by NABat.

Additional Resources