2017 Western Columbia River Gorge

This data was collected from several citizen science efforts:

1. Collect bat data at talus slopes in the Columbia River Gorge as part of a pika monitoring project (Cascades Pika Watch - https://scistarter.org/cascades-pika-watch).
I want to know if our bats use talus slopes in the Columbia gorge for winter hibernation. The pika folks wanted a large quantity of pika call recordings to use to develop automatic pika call detection algorithms, and to confirm pika presence at several talus sites. So the recorders were listening for pikas during the day, and bats in the evening (but not all night).
Recorders: 3 Wildlife Acoustics SM3BAT recorders, each with an acoustic mic (for pikas during the day) and an ultrasonic mic (for bats in the evening).
I kept one recorder running from 9/23/2017 to 4/3/2018, minus a few days where the weather was too bad to reach the site after the batteries died.

2. I and several others lead a lot of bat walks at Steigerwald Lake NWR in the summers. We use the Wildlife Acoustics Echo Meter Touch 2 device plugged into an iPad, with an external battery-powered speaker so the group can hear the bat echolocations. It records a file whenever it picks up ultrasonic sounds, and assigns a bat species if it can figure it out.

3. I have used the iPad/Echo Meter Touch device at several other locations, just doing informal surveys.

Note that not all of the recorders were running all night:

• lapierre1 & lapierre2 (SM3BAT) were running all night (5/29/2017 – 6/4/2017)
• miller1 (SM3BAT) was running all night when it was at Steigerwald (9/14/2017 – 9/22/2017), 15 minutes before sunset to 15 minutes after sunrise.
• miller1 was running as follows:
• 9/23-12/17 record for 2 hours starting 15 minutes after sunset
• 12/17-2/17 record for 90 minutes starting at sunset
• 2/17-4/3 record for 90 minutes starting 15 minutes after sunset
• strawderman1 (Echo Meter Touch) is running during the bat walks, usually for about 90 minutes starting at sunset. The iPad does not have a GPS, so I used a single spot at each site as the location, even though we were walking a 2.5 mile loop.

I used the Wildlife Acoustics Kaleidoscope software for the IDs. I wrote a small Ruby program to convert the Kaleidoscope output into BatAMP format.

The only data edits I made were for 12/24/2017 when Kaleidoscope identified a number of bats, but the files only contain noise. So I changed all the IDs that night to “Noise”. I think there was some kind of storm (or a sleigh with 8 tiny reindeer?) that made a lot of ultrasonic noise.

I have all the raw audio and data files in case you want to verify anything. I also plan to post my Ruby program once I clean it up a bit.