Screenshots from the iBats iPhone application. © Bat Conservation Trust.
Participants at the iBatsRussia workshop in Bryansk, May 2011. © Bat Conservation Trust.
In 2010/11, The Rufford Foundation provided a grant of £10,000 to The Bat Conservation Trust (BCT).
Indicator Bats Program (iBats)
The Indicator Bats Program (iBats), a partnership project between Zoological Society of London and BCT, has been generating long-term data on bat biodiversity indicator species across the globe to assess the impact of human development and climate change.
The project uses national volunteers to collect the ultrasonic calls of bats occurring along driven transects. Since starting in 2006 in Romania with funding from The Rufford Foundation and The Darwin Initiative, the programme has expanded into over 13 countries, most recently Russia, Hungary and Ukraine. Since 2006, the programme has collected data from 889 driven transects throughout the region covering 31,500 km and involving over 440 local people. Data have been collected for 14 bat species, resulting in 37,000 individual records. As a result the project has not only provided long-term monitoring data for these counties but has also dramatically raised the profile of bats and bat conservation throughout the region.
Exciting developments for 2011 include the launch of a new iBats web portal which not only improves the data management aspect of the project but also allows volunteers to explore their data more easily and the release of a free smartphone application (for iPhones and Android phones), replacing the need for a separate recording device, GPS unit and recording sheet. The application links directly with the new website thus dramatically simplifying the data gathering process.
