Welcome to CloudedBats

CloudedBats is my hobby/spare-time project where I'm trying to develop a complete set of open and free software tools to be used when acoustically monitoring bats. In the end it should cover the whole path from the ultrasonic microphone to well documented survey results that can be shared.

Target groups are both professionals like scientists and environmental consultants as well as citizen scientists and other groups of bat enthusiasts.

Why do we need open source software when monitoring bats?

For me as a software developer, collaboration and transparency is the only way today to develop and maintain software in an effective way. Everyone is doing it, both beginners as well as big companies like Google and Microsoft. And all software development tools and software libraries I use in the CloudedBats project are open and free. Then it is an easy decision to also let my software to be open and free.

What about the bats?

We know too little about the more than 1400 bat species that has been found today, and we must speed up the work. It's urgent because we are living in a rapidly changing world.

Therefore my focus is to find solutions that can be used in all countries, not only in the northern part of Europe where I live. I think it is really important that we also starts to openly and freely shares the sound files that has been recorded directly and don't wait until an article or report has been published. That will make it easier to collaborate if, for example, both scientists and enthusiasts/citizen scientists share their data and sound files.

You can read more about Open science here: Open science.

Where to start?

There are a lot of experimental applications and code parts stored in the public software repository at GitHub. They can be of some interest for software developers. The source code repository can be found here: CloudedBats at GitHub.

For normal users the bat detector called WURB is a good start. You can read more about it on the next page Bat detectors.