Bat Detective New Zealand: our latest World Tour location

Welcome to New Zealand, the latest stop on the Bat Detective World Tour! As of today we’ve just uploaded a new set of audio data to Bat Detective, recorded along survey transects on New Zealand’s South Island. You can see the locations of the surveys on the map below, and visit the Bat Detective site now to get searching for bats.

Prior to this we’ve spent the last month hosting audio data from iBats Mexico, which was neatly timed to coincide with the publication of the latest automated bat call classifier from members of our research group – a classifier for Mexican bat species. As with our results from the algorithms we’re training with Bat Detective data, it’s another example of how advances in machine learning technology are increasingly enabling the development of tools and systems for effective acoustic monitoring of bats (as well as biodiversity more broadly). You can find out more about the Mexican classification tool and how it will assist in bat population monitoring via some great coverage in the media, including in Science and an interview with our group’s Dr. Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez and Prof. Kate Jones on the BBC.

Locations on South Island, New Zealand, where iBats data were recorded

Bats occupy a unique space in the ecology of New Zealand, since they are the country’s only endemic terrestrial mammals – before humans settled the islands, the only mammals native to New Zealand were three bat species (the greater short-tailed bat, lesser short-tailed bat and long-tailed bat) and several species of marine mammal. Since human settlement this has changed, with invasive mammalian predators (such as rats and cats) driving massive declines in the populations of endemic birds and bats. Indeed, the last sighting of the greater short-tailed bat was in 1967, and it is now believed to be extinct, while New Zealand’s other two bat species, the lesser short-tailed (pictured below) and long-tailed bat, have both experienced major declines and are priorities for conservation.

The acoustic data on Bat Detective New Zealand, recorded on South Island in 2010, are much noisier than lots of the recordings you’ll have previously heard on Bat Detective. Many clips have a great deal of background noise and static, in addition to distinctive bats and unique rattling insect calls. Although this can make it challenging to determine what sounds you’re hearing, it’s very useful to include data like these while training algorithms to automatically find bat calls – this will help improve the algorithms’ ability to detect bat echolocation calls in even the most noisy of real-world acoustic recordings. This will make them more useful for surveying bats in naturally noisy and complex acoustic environments, such as urban areas where there is lots of human-generated sound, or highly biodiverse (and therefore very loud) rainforests.

We hope you’ll enjoy helping us search for bats in our New Zealand data, and as ever if you’re struggling to figure out whether a sound is a bat, an insect, or something else, you can use the Talk page to flag it up and discuss it with us and other users.

Lesser short-tailed bat (photo via New Zealand Department of Conservation)

 

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