The Bat Cave

Survey Equipment

• 1. Elekon Batlogger

  2. Dwyer Wind Meter

  3. Elekon Bat Scanner

  4. Magenta Bat II

  5. Night Owl Gen 1 Night Vision

  6. Tally counters for emergence surveys

  7. Pulsar EDGE GS 1x20 GEN1+ Night Vision (not shown)

Elekon

Magenta Electronics

Night Owl

PULSAR NV Products

Database Management 

Elekon Bat Explorer

Bat Explorer has been upgraded! Various bugs fixed and some really useful enhancements made to the way the data in a project can be cut for basic stats analysis. This is a nice package and I would highly recommend it.

 Call Analysis

Elekon Bat Explorer

More features added in V1.6 the analysis module now vastly improve the versatility of this module. The .csv output now includes temperature as well.

As of January 2013, version 1.7 provides more features to support the new 2.2 firmware and the BatLogger M.

Statistical Analysis

• 1. Microsoft Excel provides flat database and pivot table for data sorting.

  2. Processing of data is done using "the R Project" spatstat and fields packages.

  3. Processed results are then incorporated as overlays in Google Earth.

Quantum GIS (QGIS)

 QGIS is a freely available tool for the creation and manipulation of map data. It can be downloded from here: http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/wiki/Download

I recommend that you take some time out to read the tutorials before attempting to do anything with this software package as it is a complex interface to get used to. In addition, the you will need to learn some basics of map projection principles, or you will find this tool very frustrating. On the plus side, it works well for the aspects that you need for generation of environment grids and for the presentation of the modelled data from MaxEnt. It is also well supported by a vibrant user community who seem to be able answer any questions thrown at them...

MaxEnt

Maximum Entropy models can be found on the web in various forms, and there is even an implementation in R. I used the Java model written and distributed by Princeton University. The software has been used in many published research papers, and once again there is a very active user group on Google. You can download the software here: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/maxent/.

Once again, read the tutorial and description first...

The software is not very tolerant of data mismatches, so you need to make sure that all the environment grids are exactly the same grid...

OpenModeller

Although I'm still working out how to get the best out of this package, this modelling framework is worthy of attention if you are preapared to put a bit of time into validating your data or making your own contribution to the project itself. If you need a peer reviewed, validated modelling package, I would still recommend MaxEnt at this point in time, but this is one to watch and get involved with.