North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)

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What is NABat?

• The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) is an international interagency program designed to monitor bat distributions and abundances on public and private lands, and provide trend data at the state, provincial, tribal, regional (e.g., Landscape Conservation Cooperatives), and range-wide scales. 

• The goal of NABat is to provide natural resource managers with information required to manage bat populations effectively, detect early warning signs of population decline, and estimate extinction risk. 

• NABat will allow state, provincial, and federal agencies to better prioritize limited resources and engage in cross-agency collaboration. Over time, NABat will involve the public in monitoring and conservation activities. 

Scope of NABat

Currently, NABat concentrates on the 47 species of bats found in Canada and the U.S. Over time, NABat will integrate with an existing monitoring program in Mexico.  

Methods and Approaches Used in NABat

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A central component of NABat is the use of a master sample of grid cells, a spatially balanced list of sampling areas within a continental grid framework. Conducting standardized monitoring within this framework allows statistical inference to unsurveyed locations. The master sample provides operational flexibility to partners while allowing for regional and range-wide analyses. 

NABat gathers monitoring data to assess changes in bat populations using: 

• Mobile acoustic surveys along driving transects 

• Acoustic surveys at stationary points 

• Internal colony counts (winter and summer)

• External colony counts

• Capture data

Anticipated Products and Outcomes

• Status and Trends of North American Bats: Summer Occupancy Analysis (2022) 

• Spatially-explicit data on bat populations (e.g., improved range maps, density estimates) that will allow natural resource managers to identify areas and species of conservation concern 

• Long-term distribution data for addressing cross-boundary issues related to bat management and conservation 

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Accomplishments to Date

• Release of third-party data sharing platform with automated notifications and user approval which allows NABat partners to request and share data with other registered users 

• Establishment of regional hubs which facilitate implementation of NABat and guide local efforts — to date, regional hubs have been established in the following areas:  

  • Northwest  

  • Mid-Atlantic  

  • Midwest  

  • PacWest 

  • Southwest 

  • Atlantic Canada 

• Release of an annual schedule for training webinars covering topics like data processing, field methods, and contributing data to NABat 

• Development of a new offshore sample frame to support ongoing monitoring efforts related to offshore wind energy development 

• Release of the NABat R package 

• Expanded database structure to facilitate upload of bat capture records (for example, mist netting, harp trapping, and more) 

• Developed an open-source machine learning algorithm for assigning bat species IDs to acoustic recordings 

• Developed standard operating procedures for stationary acoustic and mobile transect surveys 

• More than 650 registered projects in 50 states, 10 Canadian provinces, and Puerto Rico 

• More than 3,000 NABat GRTS cells claimed for survey 

• More than 7,000 GRTS cells with survey data uploaded 

• More than 65 million acoustic files uploaded to NABat database  

• Release of nabatmonitoring.org, a website to support and disseminate information, user resources, and training materials 

• Publication of a spatially‐enabled database to house NABat data and metadata 

• Release of data visualization tools based on the NABat sample design, including mapping features to explore project data (private) and a public data map to identify current monitoring efforts and project details 

• Release of a new cell selection tool with numerous data layers, mapping features, and functionality to upload spatial objects and user-generated layers 

• Development of an automated project reporting feature for stationary acoustic and winter hibernacula data 

• Publication of the NABat Attributed Master Sample: a spatially balanced ordered list of sample units for each U.S. state and Canadian province 

• Interagency partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to utilize the NABat database as part of the Species Status Assessment for three North American bat species 

• Statewide volunteer mobile transect survey program implemented in North Carolina 

• Active engagement by U.S. and Canadian coordinators, state management agencies, and private conservation agencies 

• Four workshops and a technical report: A Plan for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat). The report describes rationale, need, sampling design, sampling framework, guidelines for data collection, data management capabilities, and analytical approaches 

• Establishment of four NABat working groups to refine survey methods and collaboratively address research needs and emerging conservation issues 

• Partnership with the U.S. Forest Service to merge the BatAMP database with NABat 

• Partnership with the National Parks Service to merge bat acoustic data collected at National Parks across North America with the NABat database