North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) acoustic data release

The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) leverages acoustic monitoring as a scalable method for collecting detection-non-detection and activity data across multiple bat species through space and time. These valuable data, collected by hundreds of partners across North America, facilitate advanced statistical analyses of bat distributions, relative abundance, and ecological trends (Loeb et al., 2015). It is a programmatic priority for NABat to reduce the barrier to entry for participating in bat acoustic monitoring through the development of innovative and community-driven solutions using NABat’s unique data and technology infrastructure. Hundreds of NABat partners across North America voluntarily contribute acoustic recordings to further science in support of bat conservation. Collaboration and data sharing are core to the NABat program, and we honor this principle by making these valuable contributions broadly available. This data release makes those acoustic recordings available with tabular metadata about the recording and species labels applied by automated classifiers and/or a manual reviewer. Metadata embedded in each acoustic file reflects values at the time the file was processed and may differ from the latest manifest (nabat-acoustic-data-manifest-YYYYMMDD.csv). It is important to note species identification errors are known to occur when attempting to classify recordings to species. With this data release, we provide transparency into the label assigned to a given file by data contributors. While individual files can be easily downloaded, access to multiple files at one time requires scripts or other code due to the volume and size of these data. Examples of how to download files and/or simple scripts are provided in the README.md.

AI-assisted coding disclosure: AI-assisted coding tools (Kiro 1.2 in Auto mode) were employed to generate code used in data processing and create documentation for a data release. All AI-generated outputs, including text, code, and analytical results, were reviewed, validated, and, where necessary, modified by the authors to ensure scientific rigor, integrity, accuracy, and compliance with USGS standards.