Transect - App for Visualizing Mobile Transect Data

Myotisoft Transect is a tool for visualizing acoustic transects using Google Earth. Simply grab a bat detector and a GPS unit, then drive, bike, or walk your transect route from start to finish. When you get home, Transect will allow you to view every bat call exactly where it was recorded!

Simply record your transect with a GPS unit (even your smart phone will work!); process your call sequence recordings to remove noise files and rename files as you identify species – SonoBat’s SonoBatch + SonoVet makes this easy. Then run the "Transecticizer" to view your calls – organized by species –  exactly where they were recorded! Full spectrum recordings from Pettersson, Binary Acoustic Technology, and Wildlife Acoustics bat detectors are supported, as well as AnaBat ZeroCrossing files. Transect runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Why you need Transect

Transect came about when interest in bat acoustic transects exploded, yet there was no way to easily visually represent the data. BCM uses all popular brands of detectors available in North America, so we needed a utility that could work with all the different metadata formats in existance.

• Transect provids a way to visualize transects geospatially, and with temporal component;
• It allows multiple instances of the same transect to be compared geospatially to discover trends;
• It makes it EASY to analyze a single transect, and to analyze multiple routes over years;
• Most importantly, it prevents vendor / platform / toolset lock-in so we don’t lose valuable years of data;
• Transect allows managers to quickly provide staff and volunteers instant gratification for their work, keeping people engaged in long projects;
• Tried and tested at Bat Survey Solutions and Bat Conservation and Management workshops since 2012. It just works.
• Does NOT require detector with built in GPS capability.
• Unlike other transect visualizing solutions that simply use quite often erroneous auto classifier results to generate tracks, Transect is a real solution intended to be  be run at the -end- of your workflow so that absolutely no noise files or undesirable misclassified bats are included in your data. 

Requirements and Download Transect

To view your bat call locations on Google Earth or a GIS program, you don't need to have a bat detector with a built-in GPS. Your project personnel don't even need the same brand of detector. Before going off half-cocked though, consider that Transect is really at the end of your data post processing workflow and do this homework first:

• Record with any detector generating a timestamp (luckily this is any modern full spectrum device from Pettersson, Binary Acoustic Technologies, BatBox Griffin, Wildlife Acoustics, legacy device data processed using the SonoBat Batch Attributer, and also Anabat files).
• Simultaneously record a GPX track log file using a modern GPS (even a smartphone app does this.
• Optionally (though rather strongly suggested for the prettiest Transect eye candy) remove all noise files, properly attribute your files with rich metadata, and manually verify species classifications and resulting filename extensions.

Once you've got your folder of bat calls the way you like them (post processed, etc.) and the GPX track file is handy, then it is time to unleash Transect on them both. Even a very large dataset will only take a few seconds to produce a Google Earth KML file.

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