PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bentley, Ian
AU  - Kuczynska, Vona
AU  - Eddington, Valerie M.
AU  - Armstrong, Mike
AU  - Kloepper, Laura N.
TI  - BatCount: A software program to count moving animals
AID  - 10.1101/2022.11.09.515821
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.11.09.515821
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/10/2022.11.09.515821.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/10/2022.11.09.515821.full
AB  - One of the biggest challenges with species conservation is collecting accurate and efficient information on population sizes, especially from species that are difficult to count. Bats worldwide are declining due to disease, habitat destruction, and climate change, and many species lack reliable population information to guide management decisions. Current approaches for estimating population sizes of bats in densely occupied colonies are time-intensive, may negatively impact the population due to disturbance, and/or have low accuracy. Research-based video tracking options are rarely used by conservation or management agencies for animal counting due to the perceived training required to operate. In this paper, we present BatCount, a free software program created in direct consultation with end-users designed to automatically count aggregations of bats at cave roosts with a streamlined and user-friendly interface. We report on the software package and provide performance metrics for different recording habitat conditions. Our analysis demonstrates that BatCount is an efficient and reliable option for counting bats in flight and has important implications for range- and species-wide population monitoring. Furthermore, this software can be extended to count any organisms moving across a camera including birds, mammals, fish or insects.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.