Technology in wild places

TrakaBat bat detectors

Designer Ian Gill holds a TrakaBat bat detector

TrakaBat detectors are the first of a new generation of thinking sensors designed to recognize the difference between echolocation calls made by bats and environmental noise made by insects and rain.

This means that the weather can’t postpone your monitoring effort – just put them out and TrakaBats will run automatically for up to 44 nights.

But the real power of the system kicks in when multiple detectors are teamed up to form Arrays like the one that identified rare short-tail bats in the Landsborough Valley in New Zealand in 2010. Read about the discovery.

As well as being useful for conservation TrakaBat Arrays also offer industry an effective way to improve their environmental assessments of areas proposed for development such as wind-farms, hydro dams or in forestry blocks scheduled for logging.

The great news is that you don't have to be a techno-wiz to deploy them and they wont bog you down with hours of post analysis work. The results are displayed in graphs that can be pasted into presentations or reports. Data storage and e-mail transfers are not a problem either because these devices can pack 5600 records into a tiny 130kB file.

TrakaBat detectors cost only $780NZ per unit. Check the exchange rate here and you will notice that's a competitive price for a self-contained device capable of minimizing your overall monitoring costs.

All of this makes TrakaBat detectors ideal reconnaissance tools. If detailed call analysis is your aim, then you can certainly improve your project's efficiency by using TrakaBat Arrays to find the best locations in which to place more expensive equipment.

	TrakaBat bat detectors TrakaBat detectors are the first of a new generation of thinking sensors designed to recognize the difference between echolocation calls made by bats and environmental noise made by insects and rain. This means that the weather can’t postpone your monitoring effort – just put them out and TrakaBats will run automatically for up to 44 nights. But the real power of the system kicks in when multiple detectors are teamed up to form Arrays like the one that identified rare short-tail bats in the Landsborough Valley in New Zealand in 2010. Read about the discovery. As well as being useful for conservation TrakaBat Arrays also offer industry an effective way to improve their environmental assessments of areas proposed for development such as wind-farms, hydro dams or in forestry blocks scheduled for logging. The great news is that you don't have to be a techno-wiz to deploy them and they wont bog you down with hours of post analysis work. The results are displayed in graphs that can be pasted into presentations or reports. Data storage and e-mail transfers are not a problem either because these devices can pack 5600 records into a tiny 130kB file. TrakaBat detectors cost only $780NZ per unit. Check the exchange rate here and you will notice that's a competitive price for a self-contained device capable of minimizing your overall monitoring costs. All of this makes TrakaBat detectors ideal reconnaissance tools. If detailed call analysis is your aim, then you can certainly improve your project's efficiency by using TrakaBat Arrays to find the best locations in which to place more expensive equipment.

	Report-friendly graphs
	The example above shows the best night at a swarming site in Germany while the example below from the same site shows the accumulated data for the entire 14-night monitoring period. In each case the time-line shows bat activity spans from 22:00 through to 05:00. The most dominant frequency range in use is 48-50kHz, but a wide range of other call frequencies are also in use in this location. It's all very simple.

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