Recent years have seen increased attention to bats as an effective bioindicator group for assessing responses to drivers of global change, which concurrently has led to a revived interest in establishing a global bat monitoring network.
Finally, I argue that to overcome the challenges associated with initiating monitoring networks in tropical countries – a major step towards the realization of global-scale bat monitoring – reliance on citizen scientists and participatory monitoring will be key.
The most recent figures from the UK national bat monitoring programme show that the species of most concern in Britain is the grey long-eared bat, an incredibly rare species with fewer than 1,000 individuals and only eight known summer roosts.
I stress the importance for long-term bat monitoring programs to have sustained funding, the need to establish trigger points for the application of appropriate mitigation measures, and for monitoring to be adaptive so as to maximize effectiveness and efficiency based on the data collected.
Bat monitoring programs need to correct for this, most importantly through the use of sampling protocols that rely on strictly standardized approaches and a well-balanced design, or a posteriori by using appropriate statistical models so as to avoid the detection of spurious trends.
Fig. 5 Variation of crop height, insect diversity (on order level), and insect abundance from June to September 2012 on 53 arable fields where the insect and bat monitoring was conducted.
Get in touch with your local bat group and/or Bat Conservation Trust to find out more about bat monitoring and hibernation surveys.
In addition, we used bat monitoring data of a large-scale monitoring study on the Schwäbische Alb and in the Hainich-Dün that was conducted in the vicinity of the study trees.
Our results are in agreement with recent results from the Czech Republic where in the winter 2009/2010, the number of sites with bats with white fungal growth increased from 4.1% in January/February (33/800 sites; regular bat monitoring) to 77.5% in late February/March (76/98 sites; additional inspections) [11].
Go the extra mile and try adding utilities such as a Bat-monitor (walkie-talkie), Bat-cuffs, a Bat-lasso, a Bat-Tracer (anything with a blinking LED), Batarangs (anywhere that sells novelty boomerangs, painted black or yellow), etc. " You should have a floor length black cape with jagged edges and blue lining.
