Estimating colony sizes of emerging bats using acoustic recordings.

ABSTRACT: The decline of bats demands more widespread monitoring of populations for conservation and management. Current censusing methods are either prone to bias or require costly equipment. Here, we report a new method using passive acoustics to determine bat count census from overall acoustic amplitude of the emerging bat stream. We recorded the video and audio of an emerging colony of Mexican free-tailed bats from two cave locations across multiple nights. Instantaneous bat counts were calculated from the video frames, and the bat stream's acoustic amplitude corresponding to each video frame was determined using three different methods for calculating acoustic intensity. We found a significant link between all three acoustic parameters and bat count, with the highest R (2) of 0.742 linking RMS

SUBMITTER: Kloepper LN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4821278 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature