RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 BatCount: A software program to count moving animals
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.11.09.515821
DO 10.1101/2022.11.09.515821
A1 Bentley, Ian
A1 Kuczynska, Vona
A1 Eddington, Valerie M.
A1 Armstrong, Mike
A1 Kloepper, Laura N.
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/10/2022.11.09.515821.abstract
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.