Russian and Ukrainian delegates at the 1st International Indicator Bats Global Monitoring Workshop in Savadisla, Romania in May 2009. © Charlotte Waters.
Kate Jones and Jon Russ meeting members of Peresvet and students at a school in Bryansk, Russia. © Natalia Koryagina.
In 2009/10, The Rufford Foundation provided a grant of £10,000 to The Bat Conservation Trust (BCT).
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 Bulgaria, Russia, Hungary and Ukraine. Since 2006, the programme has collected data from 192 driven transects throughout the region covering 20,740 km and involving over 220 local people. Since 2009, the project has been developing an application for the iPhone to increase the capacity for volunteers to record acoustic data and ways of automatically extracting and identifying calls from long recording sequences.
The project is going full steam ahead in 2010, with workshops planned in Ukraine, Hungary and Russia in May 2010. iBats is also carrying out a major overhaul of the iBats web portal (www.ibats.org.uk) planned for release in July 2010.
