Bat Detective World Tour begins next week!

As we announced recently, Bat Detective is about to go on a World Tour, and we’re inviting you to join us, starting this coming Monday 2nd November. The iBats monitoring programme, which provides us with our audio data, has now been running for a decade, with our volunteers collecting recordings of bat surveys in locations worldwide. However, to date Bat Detective has made only some of that recorded audio available for our citizen scientists to explore, and that has come mainly from Eastern Europe.

So starting on 2nd November, over the course of the World Tour we’ll be regularly uploading new sets of data to Bat Detective from different countries across the globe. Each country – ranging from Europe to places in Africa, the Americas and Asia – has its own selection of bat species alongside other acoustic inhabitants, so you can expect to encounter a variety of different soundscapes while searching for bat calls worldwide. Your help with classifying bat calls, insect noises and other sounds in these places will be of valuable assistance in our work towards creating automated bat detectors – read more about our research here.

On Monday we’ll begin our trip in the United Kingdom, home of the Bat Detective team and the Bat Conservation Trust. Keep an eye on the Bat Detective blog for a more in-depth post about British bats, citizen science, and what you might hear while exploring our UK data. We hope you’ll enjoy joining us in searching for bats across the globe, so stay tuned and see you next week…

photo via Wikimedia

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