National bat monitoring programme roost counts dataset

Many long-term wildlife population monitoring programmes rely on citizen scientists for data collection. This can offer several benefits over traditional monitoring practices as it is a cost-effective, large-scale approach capable of providing long time series data and raising public environmental awareness. Whilst there is a debate about the quality of citizen science data, a standardised sampling design can allow citizen science data to be of a similar quality to those collected by professionals. However, many programmes use subjective, opportunistic selection of monitoring sites and this introduces several types of bias, which are not well understood.
Using bat roost counts as a case study, we took a ‘virtual ecologist’ approach to simulate the effect of opportunistic site selection and uneven observer retention on our ability to accurately detect abundance trends. We simulated populations with different levels of temporal variability and site fidelity.
Our simulations reveal ...