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Collaborative monitoring over broad scales and levels of ecological organization can inform conservation efforts necessary to address the contemporary biodiversity crisis. An important challenge to collaborative monitoring is motivating local engagement with enough buy-in from stakeholders while providing adequate top-down direction for scientific rigor, quality control, and coordination. Collaborative monitoring must reconcile this inherent tension between top-down control and bottom-up engagement. Highly mobile and cryptic taxa, such as bats, present a particularly acute challenge. Given their scale of movement, complex life histories, and rapidly expanding threats, understanding population trends of bats requires coordinated broad-scale collaborative monitoring. The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) reconciles top-down, bottom-up tension with a hierarchical master sample survey design, integrated data analysis, dynamic data curation, regional monitoring hubs, and knowledge delivery through web-based infrastructure. NABat supports collaborative monitoring across spatial and organizational scales and the full annual lifecycle of bats.

Conservation of roosts is regularly recommended as a strategy to decrease the risk of threats to local bat populations (e.g., white-nose syndrome). Determining whether a roost site plays a meaningful role in maintaining a local bat population can be difficult given the variability found in roost structure type, and use by season, duration, and sex. Here we provide land managers and biologists with guidelines to aid in the decision process for determining which roosts are biologically important in maintaining healthy bat populations at a local scale. We define methods for determining biologically important roost sites and provide a case study of their use on bat roosts in Colorado. To be considered biologically important, we suggest that a roost meet two primary criteria: 1) it is considered a hibernaculum, maternity roost, transient roost, colonial bachelor roost, or fall swarming site used by bat species that are gregarious roosters, hibernators, or are known to swarm, and 2) if the site is disturbed or lost, it could affect 5% or more of the local population of the species, as defined by the investigator. Additive measures to further evaluate the importance of the roost and assign higher conservation value include: 1) a roost used by a special status species and 2) large aggregations of bats where an estimated 20% or more of the local population is roosting or swarming at the site. We also provide definitions for the seasonality of roost types, examples of several real-life scenarios where management decisions have been made for roosts, and a worksheet that helps guide users through the process.

1. White-nose syndrome (WNS) has caused the death of millions of bats, but the impacts have been more difficult to identify in western North America.Understanding how WNS, or other threats, impacts western bats may require monitoring other roosts, such as maternity roosts and night roosts, where bats aggregate in large numbers.2. Little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) are experiencing some of the greatest declines from WNS. Estimating survival and understanding population dynamics can provide valuable data for assessing population declines and informing conservation efforts.3. We conducted a 5-year mark-recapture study of two M. lucifugus roosts in Colorado. We used the robust design model to estimate apparent survival, fidelity, and abundance to understand population dynamics, and environmental covariates to understand how summer and winter weather conditions impact adult female survival. We compared the fidelity and capture probability of M. lucifugus between colonies to understand how bats use such roosts.

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