BATECHOMON, INDIA’S FIRST AUTOMATED BAT MONITORING, DETECTION SYSTEM

The device marks a new chapter for bat research in the country, its developers say Kadambari Deshpande and Vedant Barje stand next to a BatEchoMon unit. The box right behind them is the main unit with the processor. The one in the background is the auxiliary Wi-Fi component, with the solar power source on top.

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For her PhD research, bat biologist Kadambari Deshpande made overnight recordings of bat echolocation calls in the Western Ghats. A “good night” would generate about 30 GB of data from 11 hours of recording with a bat detector. To process the data, Deshpande would go through several one-minute recordings, scanning every millisecond for bat calls, and make notes on the species and other information on their behaviour and ecology.

“Tt took me 11 months to process 20 nights of data,” Deshpande said. “BatEchoMon can probably give me that in a few hours.”

BatEchoMon, short for “Bat Echolocation Monitoring”, is an autonomous system capable of detecting and analysing bat calls in real-time. It is India’s first automated bat monitoring system, developed by Deshpande and Vedant Barje under the guidance of Jagdish Krishnaswamy, as part of the Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.

Deshpande is a postdoctoral fellow at the Observatory and the School; Barje, who leads the WildTech Project at the Wildlife Conservation Trust, is a consultant there.

BatEchoMon marks a new chapter for bat research in the country, according to Deshpande. The monitoring system allows chiropterologists — scientists who study bats — to “go beyond data processing and towards asking interesting questions about bat ecology”.

“Not only will it lead to a smoother workflow, it will help people transition to recording bats in different parts of the country, allowing us to gain more insights on the natural history and ecology of different bat species,” Rohit Chakravarty, a bat researcher and conservationist at the Nature Conservation Foundation, said.

“I don’t know of any device internationally with an in-built recording plus call classifying unit. If my knowledge serves me well, BatEchoMon is a milestone in bat research globally.”