North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) Active
North American bats face unprecedented threats including habitat loss and fragmentation, white-nose syndrome, wind energy development, and climate change. However, it is difficult to evaluate the impacts of these threats due to a lack of basic information about the distribution and abundance of bats across the continent. Although bat monitoring has long been conducted in individual areas and for individual projects, until now, there has been no statistically robust and standardized monitoring program to assess the status and trends of bat populations across North America. The North American Bat Monitoring Program, or NABat, provides information to a broad constituency garnered from a continental-scale, long-term program, and allows them to better document changes in bat populations, estimate extinction risk, set conservation priorities, and evaluate the effectiveness of conservation actions.
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
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
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
Introduction to NABat
Introduction to the North American Bat Monitoring Program, including a short history of the program, a review of key program components, and highlights of program outcomes and products.
Below are publications associated with this project.
U.S. Geological Survey science in support of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
Occupancy modeling species–environment relationships with non‐ignorable survey designs
A guide to processing bat acoustic data for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
Improving geographically extensive acoustic survey designs for modeling species occurrence with imperfect detection and misidentification
A goodness-of-fit test for occupancy models with correlated within-season revisits
Establishing conservation baselines with dynamic distribution models for bat populations facing imminent decline
A plan for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
Accounting for false-positive acoustic detections of bats using occupancy models
Assessing the status and trend of bat populations across broad geographic regions with dynamic distribution models
Monitoring trends in bat populations of the United States and territories: Problems and prospects
NABat is made possible through the participation of its many partners, including those listed below.
- Overview
North American bats face unprecedented threats including habitat loss and fragmentation, white-nose syndrome, wind energy development, and climate change. However, it is difficult to evaluate the impacts of these threats due to a lack of basic information about the distribution and abundance of bats across the continent. Although bat monitoring has long been conducted in individual areas and for individual projects, until now, there has been no statistically robust and standardized monitoring program to assess the status and trends of bat populations across North America. The North American Bat Monitoring Program, or NABat, provides information to a broad constituency garnered from a continental-scale, long-term program, and allows them to better document changes in bat populations, estimate extinction risk, set conservation priorities, and evaluate the effectiveness of conservation actions.
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
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
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
-
- Data
- Multimedia
Introduction to NABat
Introduction to the North American Bat Monitoring Program, including a short history of the program, a review of key program components, and highlights of program outcomes and products.
- Publications
Below are publications associated with this project.
U.S. Geological Survey science in support of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
Bats make up one-fifth of all mammalian species worldwide and are found on every continent except Antarctica. They contribute to overall ecosystem health by suppressing pest insects and pollinating plants and spreading seeds. Eight North American bat species are listed as federally endangered or threatened, and more than one-half are of current conservation concern in the United States, Canada, orAuthorsBrian Reichert, Suzanna C. SoileauFilter Total Items: 21Occupancy modeling species–environment relationships with non‐ignorable survey designs
Statistical models supporting inferences about species occurrence patterns in relation to environmental gradients are fundamental to ecology and conservation biology. A common implicit assumption is that the sampling design is ignorable and does not need to be formally accounted for in analyses. The analyst assumes data are representative of the desired population and statistical modeling proceedsAuthorsKathryn M. Irvine, Thomas J. Rodhouse, Wilson J. Wright, Anthony R. OlsenA guide to processing bat acoustic data for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) aims to improve the state of conservation science for all species of bats shared by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. To accomplish this goal, NABat offers guidance and standardized protocols for acoustic monitoring of bats. In this document, “A Guide to Processing Bat Acoustic Data for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat),” we prAuthorsBrian Reichert, Cori Lausen, Susan Loeb, Ted Weller, Ryan Allen, Eric Britzke, Tara Hohoff, Jeremy Siemers, Braden Burkholder, Carl Herzog, Michelle VerantImproving geographically extensive acoustic survey designs for modeling species occurrence with imperfect detection and misidentification
Acoustic recording units (ARUs) enable geographically extensive surveys of sensitive and elusive species. However, a hidden cost of using ARU data for modeling species occupancy is that prohibitive amounts of human verification may be required to correct species identifications made from automated software. Bat acoustic studies exemplify this challenge because large volumes of echolocation calls cAuthorsKatharine M. Banner, Kathryn M. Irvine, Thomas J. Rodhouse, Wilson J. Wright, Rogelio M. Rodriguez, Andrea R. LittA goodness-of-fit test for occupancy models with correlated within-season revisits
Occupancy modeling is important for exploring species distribution patterns and for conservation monitoring. Within this framework, explicit attention is given to species detection probabilities estimated from replicate surveys to sample units. A central assumption is that replicate surveys are independent Bernoulli trials, but this assumption becomes untenable when ecologists serially deploy remoAuthorsWilson Wright, Kathryn M. Irvine, Thomas J. RodhouseEstablishing conservation baselines with dynamic distribution models for bat populations facing imminent decline
Aim Bat mortality rates from white-nose syndrome and wind power development are unprecedented. Cryptic and wide-ranging behaviours of bats make them difficult to survey, and population estimation is often intractable. We advance a model-based framework for making spatially explicit predictions about summertime distributions of bats from capture and acoustic surveys. Motivated by species-energy andAuthorsThomas J. Rodhouse, Patricia C. Ormsbee, Kathryn M. Irvine, Lee A. Vierling, Joseph M. Szewczak, Kerri T. VierlingA plan for the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat)
The purpose of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) is to create a continent-wide program to monitor bats at local to rangewide scales that will provide reliable data to promote effective conservation decisionmaking and the long-term viability of bat populations across the continent. This is an international, multiagency program. Four approaches will be used to gather monitoring dataAuthorsSusan C. Loeb, Thomas J. Rodhouse, Laura E. Ellison, Cori L. Lausen, Jonathan D. Reichard, Kathryn M. Irvine, Thomas E. Ingersoll, Jeremy T. H. Coleman, Wayne E. Thogmartin, John R. Sauer, Charles M. Francis, Mylea L. Bayless, Thomas R. Stanley, Douglas H. JohnsonAccounting for false-positive acoustic detections of bats using occupancy models
1. Acoustic surveys have become a common survey method for bats and other vocal taxa. Previous work shows that bat echolocation may be misidentified, but common analytic methods, such as occupancy models, assume that misidentifications do not occur. Unless rare, such misidentifications could lead to incorrect inferences with significant management implications. 2. We fit a false-positive occupanAuthorsMatthew J. Clement, Thomas J. Rodhouse, Patricia C. Ormsbee, Joseph M. Szewczak, James D. NicholsAssessing the status and trend of bat populations across broad geographic regions with dynamic distribution models
Bats face unprecedented threats from habitat loss, climate change, disease, and wind power development, and populations of many species are in decline. A better ability to quantify bat population status and trend is urgently needed in order to develop effective conservation strategies. We used a Bayesian autoregressive approach to develop dynamic distribution models for Myotis lucifugus, the littlAuthorsThomas J. Rodhouse, Patricia C. Ormsbee, Kathryn M. Irvine, Lee A. Vierling, Joseph M. Szewczak, Kerri T. VierlingMonitoring trends in bat populations of the United States and territories: Problems and prospects
Bats are ecologically and economically important mammals. The life histories of bats (particularly their low reproductive rates and the need for some species to gather in large aggregations at limited numbers of roosting sites) make their populations vulnerable to declines. Many of the species of bats in the United States (U.S.) and territories are categorized as endangered or threatened, have bee - Web Tools
- Software
- News
- Partners
NABat is made possible through the participation of its many partners, including those listed below.