This email update was received from the BCT on 30th Oct 2019:
“Hi all,
As we’re heading towards November we thought it would be a good time to update you about the British Bat Survey, and what we’re doing with the data collected this summer.
First of all we’d like to thank you again for taking part in BBatS this summer, regardless of what you were able to do. Each person who used our sign-up portal, reported an issue or asked a question helped us test and improve our systems.
In total twenty-four volunteers deployed AudioMoths at 28 sites across the South West (See image Below), collecting a truly incredible 152 nights of recordings, around 4 TB of data!.
One of the aims of this year’s trial was to test the system we’re using to classify recordings to species or genus. This involves uploading the recordings to our cloud storage, where they are processed through an automatic classification algorithm.
With so much data to upload, this has tested our network to the limit, but the good news is that almost all of the recordings have now been transferred to the cloud. The second stage is now underway, with a swarm of ‘virtual’ computers churning through the recordings to classify the bat calls.
We’re carrying out some initial checks of the algorithm outputs to ensure the new system is working correctly. This is something we’ll be focusing on over the next month.
Once these checks are complete we’ll generate a set of preliminary results for each site for you to review. We’ll then do some more manual checks of the recordings, with the aim of finalising the results by the end of the year.
Meanwhile if you have any questions, please do email us and we’ll reply as soon as possible.
Best wishes,
Sonia and Katherine
British Bat Survey Team
Bat Conservation Trust
Email: britishbatsurvey@bats.org.uk
Phone: 020 7820 7194