Pairing Anabat Detectors With 3D Roost Reconstructions

Anabat and SM4BAT full-spectrum detectors have a decade of deployed data in hibernacula across North America. EchoQuilt binds that existing call stream to a 3D quilt so each detected chirp drops onto the chamber map at its true origin coordinates.

A 2023 NABat participant in a tri-colored bat hibernaculum in the southern Appalachians ran a Song Meter SM4BAT-FS at the cave entrance for 180 winter nights, captured over 420,000 echolocation calls, and identified seven species in the local community. The call log was excellent. The spatial picture was a thin one: every call collapsed to the single point where the detector sat. Whether the calls came from the far back chamber, the cluster on the east wall, or a transient individual near the ceiling breach was invisible in the dataset. A biologist trying to understand winter roost behavior ended up with a census that lost most of its spatial information in the first integration step.