Bat Acoustic Data Post Processing and Manual Vetting

See specific fees for Florida Bonneted bat data analysis here.

See specific fees for Indiana and Northern Long-ear bat data analysis here.

Several automated software programs have been developed to handle large acoustic data sets. And, the software developers would lead us to believe that their products will make echolocation call analysis fast while providing highly confident results for species occupancy and bat activity levels. Unfortunately, the reality is that none of the current automated classifier tools associated with these programs are as accurate or precise as they need to be, especially when their outputs have the potential to impact major land management or development decisions.

The problem lies with the plasticity inherent in bat echolocation calls and how bats actually use echolocation. A bat’s need for information, and therefore the type of echolocation call it will produce, can change with prey-type, habitat complexity, and behavior. For many bat species, confident classification can only be achieved on a subset of call types within a bat’s repertoire. Currently, the only way to obtain high levels of confidence on species level identification is to have expert, human review of the recordings in question.

Because of the lackluster results from testing the accuracy of the four main analysis software programs being used in North America, land managers have been increasingly concerned over the validity of acoustic survey results and equipment. There is quite a bit of experience that goes into interpreting results from acoustic surveys. Projects attempting to place or dismiss T&E species solely on the basis of echolocation recordings can be challenging at best, it is important to be realistic about acoustic results, especially if that was the only survey method used on a project.

Not sure if you need a second opinion? We will be happy to provide new clients with our analysis of their selection of ~12 files. We will provide you with a full file-by-file description of the consensus between the classifier's output and our manual vetting for each recording you provide. Bat acoustic analysis is a very specialized field. Relying wholesale upon one reporting source for T&E species may leave consultants or managing agencies at great risk of legal liability.

What Services We Provide

1. A 2nd Opinion on already classified full-spectrum files. If your land management decisions costing up to millions of dollars hinges on relatively few audio recordings of bats, it makes sense to obtain additional expert opinions. Confidential and secure.

2. Auto-analysis with Manual Vetting on raw and/or attributed files for species of interest and/or the entire collection.

3. Complete Acoustic Survey Reports, summarizing data submitted, results of two (2) auto-classification outputs, MLE results and manual-vetting of species of interest.

What Is the Cost

Minimum charge on all projects. Each project is different; please contact John Chenger for a quote.

See specific fees for Florida Bonneted bat data analysis here.

See specific fees for Indiana and Northern Long-ear bat data analysis here.

What We Accept

Full-spectrum (FS) *.WAV Recordings  (*.ZC and *.WAC format will be accepted, at an additional charge).

Data can be submitted on an external storage device or use a file transfer service such as wetransfer.com to send up to 1 GB at a time at no charge. 

Large Batches of Data should be organized in separate folders by site.

Additional Information Required for Each Data Batch Submitted

State and County where recordings were made. Additional location information is helpful, but not required (e.g., nearest town, landownership, Lat/Long, elevation).

Date of deployment. Additional site information is helpful (e.g., weather conditions; temperature, dew point, cloud cover, humidity, wind, precipitation, etc.).

Make and Model of Detector used (include installed firmware version and all recording settings; inquire for a list of essential settings for your detector if you are unsure of what to include).

Microphone Type and Deployment description at a minimum the make and model of microphone. Addition information is often quite helpful (e.g., external cabled microphone, any directional attachments, height above-ground-level (agl), and orientation/azimuth, position in habitat; over water, in clearing, along forest edge, etc.) 

A Site Photograph is still worth a thousand words and helps us determine if call quality is suffering from microphone placement or hardware issues.