Company Profile
Northwest Bat Hub
Company Overview
We study persistence and extinction risks of bats in the context of growing threats from white-nose syndrome and rapid environmental changes occurring across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. We provide expertise on the natural history and ecology of bats, methods of survey design and acoustic call processing for species identification, and statistical analysis.
We serve as a center of gravity for interagency collaboration to pursue questions of common interest about bat conservation status and trends and inform evidence-based conservation decision-making.
Our collaborative hub enables pooling of resources and an economy of scale, leveraging individual partner investments for coordinated regional conservation knowledge and action.
Each year, the Bat Hub hires seasonal technicians to conduct bat acoustic monitoring across Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Our teams spend the summer hiking, driving, and camping in every habitat the Pacific Northwest has to offer.
Company History
The Northwest Bat Hub was founded in 2016 at the HERS Lab. We are co-managed by Oregon State University-Cascades and the National Parks Service. We have been collecting passive acoustic data for NABat since 2017, but we've grown a lot in the past seven years.
In 2019, we developed a new system for integrating citizen science into bat monitoring with our Audible Bats Project. As of 2024, we are collecting both passive and active acoustic data across Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. We have grown from a two person operation to a well-rounded team that works with the whole alphabet soup of agency partners on bat acoustics, capture, white-nose sampling, MOTUS, call analysis, and more.