Monitoring the Relative Abundance of Bats at National Parks of the Upper Midwest - GLKN

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OVERVIEW, RECIPIENT AND NPS SUBSTANTIAL INVOLVEMENT In this Cooperative Agreement, North Dakota State University (NDSU) will engage a Masters of Science student for academic years 2017 and 2018 to assist the National Park Service, Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network (GLKN) with coordination, development, and validation of bat monitoring at ten (10) NPS units in the upper Midwest. The field methods are well defined and documented in a draft protocol with detailed standard operating procedures. The NDSU student will coordinate efforts by biological technicians based in parks that will deploy acoustic recording devices and electronically transfer data to GLKN. The science question that GLKN would like the NDSU student to address is: Given the current knowledge of bat species ranges in the upper Midwest, how does proprietary software packages and expert manual identification of bat echolocation calls differ? The student will be expected to design a scientifically rigorous experiment to measure differences in species identification among at least two software packages and at least two observers who will do manual vetting of at least 1% of all calls recorded each year (450,000 in 2016). The NPS-GLKN will have substantial involvement in project design, implementation, data management, analysis, and writing of resulting reports and publications. The NPS principal investigator will be on the student’s thesis committee. The Recipient is a member of the Northern Great Plains Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit (CESU) who was awarded a Master Cooperative Agreement (P12AC31164) allowing North Dakota State University to participate in specific tasks, and can provide the necessary activities involved in this particular task while providing an effective outcome for NPS and the objectives of this research/educational project. The advising professor at NDSU, Erin Gillam, has expertise in bat echolocation calls, how to identify them, and the behaviors and ecology of bats that we need to identify.

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