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TrakaBat bat detectors

Bat recognition technology delivers results faster

Dealing with excessive amounts of data is a problem about equal to shoving a whale into a bottle. So why do we grab so much costly information when monitoring bats? It hardly seems productive to troll through gigabytes of information for hours on end just to index general bat activity. Then there is the problem of storing and sharing large blocks of data to consider. Time for a rethink.Designer Ian Gill holds a TrakaBat bat detector

TrakaBat detectors are the first of a new generation of thinking sensors designed to recognize the difference between echolocation calls made by bats and environmental noise made by insects and rain.

 This means that the weather can’t postpone your monitoring effort – just put them out and these detectors will work for up to 40 nights. 

 But the real power of the system kicks in when multiple detectors are teamed up to form Arrays like the one that identified rare short-tail bats in the Landsborough Valley in New Zealand in 2010. Read about the discovery

As well as being useful for bat conservation TrakaBat Arrays also offer industry an effective way to improve their environmental assessments of areas proposed for development such as wind-farms, hydro dams or in forestry blocks scheduled for logging.
  
The great news is that you don't have to be a techno-wiz to deploy them and they won't bog you down with hours of post analysis work. The results are displayed in graphs that can be pasted into presentations or reports. A text summary is also created.  Data storage and e-mail transfers are not a problem either because these devices can pack 10,000 records into a tiny 130kB file.

 TrakaBat detectors cost only $NZ880 per unit. Check your currency here and you will notice that the exchange rate makes this a competitive price for a self-contained device capable of minimizing your overall monitoring costs. 

 All of this makes TrakaBat detectors ideal reconnaissance tools. If detailed call analysis is your aim, then you can certainly improve your project's efficiency by using TrakaBat Arrays to find the best locations in which to place more expensive equipment.

Rapid results...
Graph showing TrakaBat results
Summary results from a 42-night monitoring period in Fiordland National Park. Both New Zealand bat species are present.  The time-line shows most bat activity spans from 22:00 through to 05:00.  On low-noise nights short-tail bats (STB) were detected every night at average rate of 67-passes per night. Long tail bats were detected on most nights at a much lower average rate of 2.7 passes per night. The most dominant frequency range detected was 24-28kHz.