Tropical Bat Call Detection and Classification

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Context

Bats are common throughout Cambodia, and are highly visible features of various pagoda and national monuments, which often host colonies of fruit bats such as Lyle’s flying fox, one of 31 species endemic to southeast Asia.

Bats play critical roles within their ecosystems, particularly in pest control, seed dispersal, and pollination of various plants including many fruit trees.

Cambodia is the only known country with an ancient tradition of bat cultivation for guano production, which remains in practice today. The lack of reliable data and limited number of studies have left a dearth of knowledge of these important creatures and hampers conservation efforts. The use of bats for illegal bush meat and traditional medicine trade as well as rapidly disappearing habitat and use of pesticides are causing declines in bat population and put several species at risk of extinction. Cambodia’s biodiversity remains understudied, and this is particularly true for bats, with very limited research published.

While the neighboring countries of Thailand and Vietnam both have over 100 bat species recorded, ten years ago Cambodia only had 30 species recorded. Today, Cambodia is known to have over 70 species of bat, with five of those new to science. Just last year a new species of bat—the Hayes’ thick-thumbed myotis—was identified after being caught in the capital city of Phnom Penh.

What more is waiting to be found?

– Cambodian Urban Bat Project

The Cambodia Urban Bat Project will use citizen science volunteers to make acoustic recordings of the bats while walking and riding transects in a diversity of urban spaces, but particularly those known to be frequented by bats. Citizen scientists will also do stationary recordings in hotspots that are identified by the surveys.

Project Scope and Objectives

Our partnership is focused on developing Pytorch-Wildlife bioacoustics features for classification of bat calls. This would enable better understanding and protection of bats by enabling researchers to easily visualize and classification the large number of bat call recordings gathered by the citizen science community and shared made publicly available to all for further research on iNaturalist as well as potentially other platforms or research publications.