Acoustic surveillance of bats along the Green and Colorado Rivers

Aim: Emerging research shows how bioindicators, specifically bats, can serve as a means for monitoring conservation and management of riparian corridors for multiple taxonomic groups. To track changes in composition or abundance of bioindicator species, researchers must attain a baseline in species presence and relative activity. We examined the spatial and temporal patterns of bat community composition and activity along a 1,000-mile river corridor to determine species diversity trends by latitude and habitat.
Location: Colorado River Basin
Methods: Here we describe the results from an acoustic bat survey conducted opportunistically on the 2019 Sesquicentennial Colorado River Exploring Expedition. This broad, 1,000-mile survey provides a baseline for species distributions over a large geographic range.
Results: In total, we collected 63 nights of acoustic data over 70-days and recorded over 59,000 files equating to 45,363 call files (≥2 pulses). 18,490 (41% of call files) were identifi..., Bat surveys were spatially independent (between 7 and 30 river miles between camps) and conducted using a Wildlife Acoustics SM4BAT FS Full-Spectrum Ultrasonic Recorder™ with SMM-U2 microphones (Wildlife Acoustics, Maynard, MA, USA). According to the manufacturer’s guide (Wildlife Acoustics 2019), the SMM-U2 can cover up to 8x the amount of airspace as the SMM-U1 (maximum detection range of older units [SM3Bat + SMM-U1] estimated at ~40m; (Cortes & Gillam 2020).
We identified species based on echolocation calls and call sequences using two methods: semi-automated identification software paired with manually vetting. Acoustic files were run through both Kaleidoscope Pro 5.1.9 Analysis Software (Bats of North America classifier 5.1; Wildlife Acoustics, Maynard, MA, USA) and SonoBat version 4.4.5 (North America, Great Basin North, Great Basin, and Southwest regional classifiers; DNDesign, Arcata, California, USA) to compare and vet bat species identification. We then compared the two o..., , # Data from: Acoustic surveillance of bats along the Green and Colorado Rivers

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxcw](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxcw)

Acoustic data were collected 63 consecutive nights during a survey of the Green and Colorado Rivers (1,000-mile section of river). Data were collected using a Wildlife Acoustics SM4BAT FS Full-Spectrum Ultrasonic Recorder™ with SMM-U2 microphones (Wildlife Acoustics, Maynard, MA, USA). Acoustic files were run through both Kaleidoscope Pro 5.1.9 Analysis Software (Bats of North America classifier 5.1; Wildlife Acoustics, Maynard, MA, USA) and SonoBat version 4.4.5 (North America, Great Basin North, Great Basin, and Southwest regional classifiers; DNDesign, Arcata, California, USA) to compare and vet bat species identification. We then compared the two outputs using the *comparedf* function in the ‘compare’ package (Murrell 2022) in Program R and manually vetted all calls that were identified as two different species in Sonobat...