Mon Apr 14 00:00:00 UTC 2025: ## Indian Scientists Develop Revolutionary Automated Bat Monitoring System

**Bengaluru, India (April 14, 2025)** – Indian scientists have developed BatEchoMon, India’s first automated system for monitoring bat echolocation calls. This innovative technology, developed by bat biologist Kadambari Deshpande and engineer Vedant Barje at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, significantly accelerates bat research in the country.

Previously, analyzing bat echolocation data was a painstaking manual process, taking months to process even a small dataset. BatEchoMon automates this, processing data in hours. The system uses a low-cost ultrasonic detector, a Raspberry Pi microprocessor, and a convolutional neural network algorithm to identify bat species in real-time. It records, stores, processes, and analyzes species-wise bat activity, generating spectrograms and statistical data on bat activity. The device is solar-powered and can operate autonomously for up to eight days.

The system represents a significant advancement in bat research globally, according to experts. Rohit Chakravarty, a bat researcher at the Nature Conservation Foundation, notes that there is no known international equivalent with integrated recording and call classification capabilities. The affordability of BatEchoMon—estimated at one-third the cost of comparable systems—will make bat research more accessible across India.

While currently able to identify six to seven common Indian bat species, the researchers aim to expand the system’s capabilities by collaborating with other researchers and building more comprehensive reference libraries of bat calls. This collaboration is crucial, given the limited availability of such data in India.

The development of BatEchoMon addresses a key knowledge gap identified at the ‘State of India’s Bats’ workshop. The system’s success hinges on further funding for surveys and the creation of robust training datasets to improve species identification accuracy. The team plans to conduct extensive field testing and beta testing with other researchers to refine the system. BatEchoMon promises to revolutionize bat research in India and globally, unlocking new insights into bat ecology and conservation.

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