BatEchoMon:
India’s First Automated Bat Monitoring and Detection System was created by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.
- BatEchoMon stands for “Bat Echolocation Monitoring”. It is India’s first automated, real-time bat monitoring and detection system.
- The system was developed by bat biologist Kadambari Deshpande and engineer Vedant Barje under the guidance of Jagdish Krishnaswamy.
- It was designed as part of the Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory at the School of Environment and Sustainability, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.
- BatEchoMon autonomously detects, records, analyses, and classifies bat echolocation calls in real-time something that previously took researchers months to do manually.
- It includes:
- An ultrasonic microphone using a modified AudioMoth
- A Raspberry Pi microprocessor to process and classify calls.
- A solar-powered battery for power and a Wi-Fi unit for data transmission.
- The device activates automatically at sunset and continuously records audio through the night.
- It uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm to distinguish bat calls from other sounds and to classify them based on peak frequency and call structure.
