Sharing your bat records

We would like to encourage as many people as possible to upload verifiable flight recordings of bats to online databases, Either iRecord, or preferably iNaturalist. Once verified, with the right permissions, these can then be used by your Local Environmental Records Centre (LERC).

Anyone who has recordings of bats echolocation can take part, and even if you don’t have your own recordings you can still help out by validating the records posted by others.

What bat recordings to upload?

We are on a mission to get as many verified (“research grade”) bat flight recordings in iNaturalist (or iRecord) as possible. However, as we are only trying to establish the presence of each bat species, there is no point in having many duplicate records for the same location and time.

How to easily upload a bat recording

The iNaturalist (and iRecord) apps and websites allow anyone to add biological records to a vast database. However, it is not easy to manually upload multiple verifiable bat flight records.

In 2022 Dr Tom August from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) created a website called Bat2iNat to solve this problem and made it easy to batch upload bat recordings made with an Echo Meter Touch (EMT) to iNaturalist. This proof of concept is now being developed into a tool to allow wildlife recordings to be uploaded to a variety of online biological databases, with bats to iRecord and iNaturalist being the initial ones targeted. This tool is called BatSync, and is currently publicly available as an Alpha test.

Help out by validating bat records

We are hoping to build up a strong network, a community, who enjoy looking at and identifying bat records.

iNaturalist

iNaturalist allows anyone to verify the records others based on the evidence uploaded. Hence if you have experience with bat call sound analysis, you can review and validate UK bat records uploaded by others.

You can also look at all the bat records in the UK that have already been verified as “research grade”, to see if you agree.

Records have to have 2/3rds of the suggested IDs to match, for the record to become “Research Grade”, and hence be usable by a LERC. Hence if you do disagree, your alternate suggestion carries double the weight of supporting suggestions.

iRecord

iRecord only allow certain approved verifiers to approve records, from their website:

“the verifiers on iRecord are expert volunteers working on behalf of the national recording schemes. The larger recording schemes often have teams of “county recorders” who are the verifiers for their county or region, while the smaller schemes may have just one or a few experts for the whole country.”

This reliance on a few expert verifiers means that in some cases, very few bat records get verified. For example in our county less than 1% of the bat records in iRecord are verified.

For this reason, unless more “expert verifier” are added for bats, or iRecord changes its policy, we do not recommend uploading multiple bat records to it, as the current verification system cannot cope with the backlog already.