Bat related work at the WSL

("Fledermausarbeiten an der WSL" hier auf Deutsch)

As a tiny but eager group, we (Martin Obrist and Ruedi Boesch) are pursuing work on bats at the WSL. We heavily rely on external help. Most noteable is the cooperation with Peter Flückiger, the regional bat protection coordinater in the canton of Solothurn and curator of the Natural History Museum of the city of Olten.

In a joint pilot project we showed that echolocating bats can be identified by their calls with the help of a computer and synergetic pattern recognition algorithms, thereby avoiding person-specific bias due to different education and experience.

Now we all are working on a follow-up project, focussing on the application of this new system in the field as monitoring tool. By running the automated monitoring simultaneously at a multitude of sites per night and many nights per year, we would like to identify habitats used by bats and assign species specific habitat preferences.

Specifics to our bat work

Projects

• Acoustic species recognition with synergetics (finished)
• Monitoring and habitat requirement assessment (running)

Products

• BATIT: Bioacoustic Taxon Identification Tool
• Harp-trap

People

• Martin Obrist: project coordinator, bioacoustics specialist, zoologist
• Ruedi Boesch: electronics, physics, math and software specialist
• Peter Flückiger: ecologist, field zoologist, field site coordinator

Hit any of the banner-images to gain more insight into our bat related work!