Discerning behavioral habits of echolocating bats using acoustical and computational methods

Bioindicators, such as bats and frogs, are animals with high sensitivity to environmental conditions. Monitoring the collective behavior of these animals is critical in understanding the health of the environment. Monitoring strategies target a shared behavioral trait to observe an animal groups’ presence or absence. To monitor bats, the trait that is most useful is their ability to echolocate. Bats use echolocation to navigate their surroundings and hunt insects by producing high frequency calls and listening for their echoes. This allows them to be acoustically monitored using microphones to capture their activity in the form of echolocation calls. These large volumes of acoustic data can be extremely useful in studying individual and collective behaviors. This is where the field of acoustics and computation can be merged to develop efficient and scalable monitoring methods for discerning bat behavioral patterns. In this work, I collected passive acoustic monitoring data in the Union Bay Natural Area during Fall 2021 and evaluated the performance of multiple automatic detection algorithms. I plan to present preliminary results from applying different algorithms and discuss future data collection and analysis efforts.

May 20, 2022 3:45 PM