Discover your local wildlife and contribute to conservation!
The North Somerset Bat Survey is part of the South West Wildlife Monitoring Project led by UWE’s Bat Conservation Research Lab, working in partnership with BTO, North Somerset Council and the Avon Wildlife Trust.
Bats play a crucial role in maintaining ecosystems, particularly through controlling insect populations, but development threatens bat populations through habitat loss and fragmentation. The North Somerset Bat Survey is a citizen science project, meaning that they rely on individuals to conduct bat monitoring surveys, no experience required!
Here’s how it works:
- Sign up by reserving a 1km square to survey
- Choose a survey location within your 1km-square and get permission from the landowner using our standard letter and landowner permission slip
- Reserve a detector (8 days/7 nights) from a detector hosting centre
- Deploy the detector in your 1km-square for 6 nights
- Upload the data to the system
- Return the kit to the detector hosting centre
- Await results!
To participate, you’ll need a few things:
- A smartphone or tablet equipped with a Bluetooth chipset of version 4.0 or higher.
- A desktop PC or laptop running on at least Windows 7 or Apple OS X 10.10 (or later versions).
- A reliable internet connection for uploading data.
- Up to 30 GB of hard drive space to temporarily store data before uploading from the SD card.
- Ideally, a bamboo cane/post onto which you can affix your detector >1.5 m above the ground.
- A sense of adventure!
If you encounter any technical issues while uploading audio files, don’t worry! You can simply post your SD card and the Bat Survey Team will take care of the rest.
There are detector hosting centres across North Somerset (including Clifton Suspension Bridge Museum), where you can collect and return your bat detector kit. When reserving your detector you will receive further information about picking up your kit from your chosen detector hosting centre.
Visit the Bat Survey website to find out more and reserve your detector.