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'Citizen Scientists' invited to help record
Europe's bat population
Thursday October 04, 2012 08:03:19 PM,
IANS
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London: A website that
is a collaboration of many institutes working for the conservation
of bats is calling on "citizen scientists" to help researchers
monitor and record the population of bats in Europe.
The "Bat Detective" website needs people to help identify bat
calls to help develop automated identification tools, BBC
reported.
The programme is a partnership project among University College
London, Zoological Society of London, The Bat Conservation Trust,
BatLife Europe, University of Auckland, and the Citizen Science
Alliance.
The site converts "normally inaudible bat calls" into something
humans can hear and provides information needed to help visitors
identify species, the report said.
Scientists say understanding bat populations provides an important
indicator of ecosystem health.
"Bats use a lot of different types of sounds, from singing to each
other to find a mate and to using echoes from their tweets to find
their way around," Kate Jones, joint chairwoman of ecology and
biology at the University College of London (UCL) and the
Zoological Society of London (ZSL), was quoted as saying.
"Usually, bat sounds are inaudible to humans as they are too high
for us to hear but special 'time expansion' ultrasonic detectors
convert these sounds to a lower frequency," said Jones, also the
chairwoman of the UK Bat Conservation Trust.
"Visitors to the Bat Detective website can listen to these unique
recordings and help us distinguish different sounds."
Conservationists say one in four species are threatened with
extinction.
"We hope hundreds of thousands of people will help us listen in to
what the bats are saying and to also build important tools for
conservation," said Chris Lintott from the University of Oxford,
who led the team that designed and built the website.
BBC said that in a recent paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology,
researchers published details about a freely available online tool
used to identify the calls of bat species found in Europe.
Data collected by volunteers across Europe allowed them to develop
the identification tool, iBatsID, which has been used to identify
34 out of continent's 45 known species.
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