How to easily upload bat flight records

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

The problem

Adding verifiable bat recordings (from an Echo Meter Touch (EMT) or other devices) to an online database is really hard to do manually. They are tailored towards uploads of photos of wildlife, and they work superbly at this.

If you try to manually upload an bat observation, not only do you have to include either an original wav file and/or a screenshot of a bat call spectrogram. But you also have to manually enter all the metadata, including species, date and time, map location and any notes, for every recording.

Including the spectrogram screenshot, and truncating the wav file, all this takes about 10 minutes per bat record and is not a practical process if you need to upload dozens of bat records.

A solution

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.

You can use BatSync to log into your iNaturalist or iRecord account, and it allows multiple wav files to be uploaded as a batch. As the batch is processed BatSync extracts the metadata (in GUANO format) from the .Wav file and processes this to automatically adds a new online record.

Current BatSync status

As of July 2026, the Alpha has ended, and funding is being sought for the second development phase.

Currently the Alpha is usable and publishes records to iNaturalist and iRecord. However:

  1. The user experience needs further refinement
  2. It only produces one low resolution spectrogram, which is not detailed enough for Bat ID verification

For these reasons we suggest NOT using BatSync, until it has had further development.

Reuse of your records

If you would like your bat flight records to be able to be used by other researchers and Local Environment Records Centres, then please do consider changing your account settings to allow commercial use of your records to either:

No Copyright (CC0) – View License
Click here for a brief definition of CCO

This license releases your work into the public domain, so others can copy, modify, distribute and perform your work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission or giving you credit. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution (cc-by) – View License
Click here for a brief definition of CC-BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

You can do this on either platform:

iNaturalist 
  • Go into Account settings > Content and Display”
  • Under Licensing, please consider changing all three “Default ***** license”(s) to CCO or CCby
iRecord
  • Go to “My Account settings” and click on the “Edit” Tab.
  • Change the rights under “Licence for your photos and other media” to CCO or CCby