Project Summary

 Isle of Wight Context

The Isle of Wight is located just off the south coast of England as you can see in the map below:

16 of the UK's native species have been observed in various locations on the Island including the Alcathoe Bat. The Parti-Coloured and Nathusius' Pipistrelle Bats are also regular visitors, and the Island is a major stronghold for the Barbastelle and Bechsteins Bats. Apart from some Forestry Commission plantations, the Island's woodland has remained largely undisturbed since Napoleonic times. This has left significant areas of connected woodland with relatively mature trees providing ideal woodland bat roosting habitat. Whilst tourism is the main industry on the Island, agriculture has been established for centuries, and the majority of the land is used for agriculture, both arable and dairy farming.

Project Objectives

You may well have come across my previous project, "The Parkhurst Forest Bat Project" and so will already be aware of my efforts to survey and produce habitat suitability models of the Parkhurst Forest area. The objective of this project is design a survey protocol and MaxEnt model for the whole Island, and so provide the most complete and up to date picture of bats' habitat use across the Island.

Site Content

This site is essentially a summary of the project notebook, so the content and structure will develop over time, and if you are interested it is worth looking up the site from time to time. The "Bat Blog" contains a brief summary of where progress has been made with the project.

Volunteers Needed

The scale and resources needed to complete this project are significantly greater than the Parkhurst Forest Bat Project, hence if you live on the Island and have an interest in Bat Ecology or want to some practical experience in acoustic bat survey work and/or habitat modelling, please get in touch with me via the IoW Bat Group.   

Acoustic Surveys and Echolocation Call Classification

All the echolocation call classification in this survey has been carried out using semi-automated classification (Bat Explorer) with manual inspection of all the calls. The typical recording attrition is around the 50% mark, due mainly to insufficient clarity of the call start frequency (non-linear atmospheric attenuation effects). If you want to know about echolocation call classification, please visit this page on the Parkhurst Forest Bat Project website.

New Google Site Format

I've had to migrate the site from "Classic" to "New" format. This means click on thumbnail for full size images has gone, however you can still get the full size pictures in a browser by right right-clicking and choosing "display in a new tab".