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Abstract:
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North American bats are facing increasingly serious conservation threats due to the rapid spread of the bat disease white-nose syndrome, an expanding footprint of the wind power industry, and accelerated global change. However, bats are under-studied relative to other taxonomic groups (amphibians, birds, carnivores, etc.) because of their cryptic and nocturnal behavior. To combat the dearth of data available to inform conservation and management of bats nationally, a collaborative monitoring effort was proposed in 2015 — the North American Bat monitoring program (NABat). The easiest way to collect data on bats is to use remotely deployed acoustic recording devices. On a given night zero to hundreds of echolocation calls can be recorded from multiple bat species. The spatial design for NABat was created to harness the occupancy modeling framework. However, based on empirical data and the realities of a collaborative monitoring effort, we were motivated to expand on the available model assessment techniques, understand ways to adjust model estimates for non-ignorable surveys, develop count detection models, and create R packages for conducting customized power analyses.
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