Bats remain high on the list of globally-threatened taxa, in part because of data-knowledge gaps. Crypsis and negative social stereotypes are two reasons for these gaps but novel crises facing bats have contributed to a renewed commitment among bat conservationists to close data gaps and better inform conservation. One manifestation of this is the increasing use of automated acoustic recorders of bat calls. These recorders can be deployed over broad extents and long durations, yielding big data that can answer fundamental but previously unanswerable questions about bat population status and trend. This capability has motivated the development of monitoring programs and citizen science data aggregators such as North American Bat Monitoring Program. Passive recording of bats produces large numbers of call files that can be assigned to species and used to generate analyses such as occupancy models. However, data management and the processing and correct assignment of calls to species emerges as a fundamental challenge. To meet this challenge, we launched the Northwestern (US) Bat Hub in 2017, the first of an anticipated network of several regional bat hubs intended to facilitate data management and the flow of information between local data collectors and national-level aggregators and to build local engagement via science co-production and translation.
Results/Conclusions
The Hub model of organization enabled us to harness the power of big acoustic data via flexible statistical survey design and Bayesian model inference, workflow efficiencies, human collaboration, and contemporary computing, outlined in a regional Hub protocol. This process was demonstrated with an analysis that harnessed legacy acoustic monitoring data that began in 2003 and that provided one of the first empirical assessments of region-wide bat population decline. We found evidence of population decline in the hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus), at ~2% per year since 2010. Our analysis reveals evidence of potential decline in several other species. This has motivated strategic and highly collaborative conservation that builds upon these foundational accomplishments to pursue a series of questions using more targeted methods, contextualized by the regional assessment. The Oregon State University-housed NW Bat Hub represents an interagency collective that has formed around this big data-generating and –translating activity, providing a center of gravity for accelerated collaborative conservation and has emerged as a replicable solution for harnessing the power of big data and the power of human collaboration.