In the UK roosting bats are protected, and syrveys are required eo ensure that no protected animals are in any given residence. Bats, of course, are hard to spot — just ask anyone who lives in Gotham. Tegwyn Twmffat has put together relatively inexpensive way to find those mammalian flyers. Here’s more from the Design Spark:
Although auto-classification of bats had been done before, I thought it would be fun to have a go myself. After a few false starts and some communication on this, particularly friendly, Facebook group: Bat Call Sound Analysis Workshop I settled on a solution using Random Forest and a set of feature extraction algorithms from Bioacoustics. After following the Bioacoustics tutorial I managed to get some basic training and deployment scripts up and running in the R language, despite never having used it before. I did, however, have to go back more recently and work out how to use it properly to create .csv files for producing into graphs!
Finding data for the classifier was not as easy as we might expect. In theory, there should exist a number of ‘citizen science’ databases crammed full of audio recordings of the bats of the UK and northern Europe, but, for some reason, they’ve all been made inaccessible to the general public. Fortunately, I found 6 species in my back yard and, with the help of a few other enthusiasts, I cobbled together a data-set of 9 of the 17 species found in the UK for testing. I also added recordings of rattling my own house keys to help test the system when no bats were available.
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