BatCount: A software program to count moving animals

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges with species conservation is collecting accurate and efficient information on population sizes, especially from species that are difficult to count. Bats worldwide are declining due to disease, habitat destruction, and climate change, and many species lack reliable population information to guide management decisions. Current approaches for estimating population sizes of bats in densely occupied colonies are time-intensive, may negatively impact the population due to disturbance, and or have low accuracy. Research-based video tracking options are rarely used by conservation or management agencies for animal counting due to the perceived training required to operate. In this paper, we present BatCount, a free software program created in direct consultation with end-users designed to automatically count aggregations of bats at cave roosts with a streamlined and user-friendly interface. We report on the software package and provide performance metrics for different recording habitat conditions. Our analysis demonstrates that BatCount is an efficient and reliable option for counting bats in flight and has important implications for range- and species-wide population monitoring. Furthermore, this software can be extended to count any organisms moving across a camera including birds, mammals, fish or insects.

Electric vehicle fleet penetration helps address inequalities in air quality and improves environmental justice

“…To develop link-level emission rates for all roadways in the modeling domain, link-based activity data including vehicle speed and traffic volume in 2016 from Streetlytics TM data by Bentley Systems, Inc. 72 , and heavy-duty truck volume from the California Transportation Department 73 were extracted. The roadway geometry was based on spatially detailed 2019 HERE Technologies roadway network data 74 .…”

Advances in understanding bat infection dynamics across biological scales

“…For instance, smaller on-animal trackers and batteries will enable movement studies for smaller species [55]. Automated video analysis tools, combined with thermal imaging cameras, will enable monitoring of departures from typical behavioural patterns in high bat density environments [56–58]. Identifying disruptions to typical patterns will require robust long-term baseline behavioural data for multiple species.…”