Carding

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• Using an array of small video cameras, we filmed the bats leaving their roost and then developed artificial intelligence to count them.
• This offers an inexpensive, fast and repeatable way to count large numbers of moving animals.
• Our average estimate for the Kasanka colony for five days in November 2019 was 857,233 bats.
• This makes it one of the biggest bat colonies in the world, and the most important in Africa.

Why counting is important

• They disperse seeds every night over distances of 75km and more – three times further than the African elephant.
• Standardised counts are critical to distinguish between colony shifts due to disturbance by people and population-level declines that require conservation management.
• Read more:
  Fruit bats: the winged 'conservationists' reforesting parts of Africa

  Counting the Kasanka colony is important for another reason too.

• So large colonies indicate a healthier, more food-rich landscape, and are also key to maintaining the collective behaviour of migration.

The counting

• For our new counting approach, we decided to film the bat emergence in a standard way, count the bats in each video, and then extrapolate a total number.
• Manually counting bats in these videos was not realistic – there were just too many of them.
• We checked the accuracy of the AI method by manually counting some short clips and found it was detecting 95% of the bats.
• We might not have caught the colony at peak size during our five days of counting, so we can say there are about a million bats in Kasanka at peak season in November.

Future monitoring

• We hope this will allow us to identify changes in numbers to inform conservation efforts.
• These are important because protecting the Kasanka colony helps protect bats from the entire sub-continent.
• Monitoring will be crucial to reveal and prevent these effects wherever the species provides ecosystem services.

• Solar farms are now a striking feature of the British landscape.
• But despite their growth, we’re still largely in the dark about how solar farms impact biodiversity.
• We found that bat activity is reduced at solar farms compared to neighbouring sites without solar panels.

Reduced activity

• We monitored 19 pairs of these sites, each for a week, observing bat activity within the fields’ centre and along their boundaries.
• Other bat species or groups like soprano pipistrelles, noctules, serotines, myotis bats and long-eared bats also saw their activity drop.
• Total bat activity was almost halved at the boundaries of solar panel fields compared to that of control sites.
• And at the centre of solar panel fields, bat activity dropped by two-thirds.

Why are bats avoiding solar farms?

• In 2012, for example, one academic estimated that around 888,000 bats may have been killed at wind energy facilities in the United States.
• The way solar farms affect bats is probably more indirect than this.
• But, given the sloped orientation of solar panels, these potential direct effects may not be of primary concern.

Improving habitats

• Research suggests that increasing turbine cut-in speeds by 1.5 metres per second can reduce bat fatalities by at least 50%, with an annual loss to power output below 1%.
• A slightly different approach could be applied to solar farms.
• Improving habitats by planting native trees along the boundaries of solar farm fields could potentially increase the availability of insects for bats to feed on.
• Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue.