The first week of April, Marina and Nick went to the Western Bat Working Group Biannual Meeting in Santa Fe, NM. The meeting was geared to updating the Western Bat Species Regional Priority Matrix in the face of new threats such as climate change and white-nose syndrome. Break-out groups for different Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) worked together to assess the scope and severity of different threats for every bat species in the western United States. Assessing threat levels for all the western bat species is a difficult process but worthwhile if we want to effectively manage and protect bats! Marina presented her poster “Comparing three bat acoustic sampling methodologies for large-scale surveys” and received lots of good feedback from researchers interested in conducting mobile acoustic surveys.

Nick was awarded a seat in a three day Wildlife Acoustics Bat Detector Training Course, led by Dr. Cori Lausen, through the Bob Berry Scholarship Fund. The course immediately followed the Western Bat Working Group Meeting, and covered the use and deployment of the SM2BAT+ and the EM3, along with an introduction to call analysis in Kaleidoscope Pro, SonoBat, and AnalookW. Nick is very thankful for this award, which has helped him become more knowledgeable in the set-up and deployment of these Song Meters, which he will use during his acoustic surveys beginning this summer in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico.