White-nose-syndrome monitoring demands entry-light cave mapping that does not wake torpid colonies, and traditional LiDAR sweeps flood roosts with disturbing light and human presence.
30 articles
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.
Some winter visits are unavoidable. When a biologist has to enter a hibernaculum, the light they bring matters — not just the brightness, but the color, the direction, and the dark-adaptation time on either side of exposure. EchoQuilt provides the map that makes lights-off navigation practical.
A thermistor tells you the temperature at a point; an acoustic map tells you the shape of the room. Put them on the same voxel grid and the pair explains why a tri-colored bat cluster sits in that specific pocket and not two meters away.
Myotis echolocation at 40-80 kHz overlaps with the same array that EchoQuilt uses for passive geometry. Naive mapping treats the calls as noise; done right, they become a second data layer that refines both the map and the species census.
Arousals eat 60-85% of a hibernating bat's winter energy budget, which means survey timing matters as much as survey method. EchoQuilt times its analytical windows against the torpor cycle rather than the calendar, and the phenology quilt it builds is more faithful to bat biology than any fixed-date protocol.
A first-year hibernaculum install is the one moment EchoQuilt requires human entry — so the install window, the decontamination sequence, and the sensor placement all matter. This is the practical walk-through for a pre-swarm deployment that leaves torpid clusters untouched all winter.
Hibernacula microclimate drives where bats cluster and whether Pd flourishes, yet field teams rarely map airflow because doing so requires entering the cave with anemometers. EchoQuilt derives airflow patterns from the sound the moving air already makes.
Each arousal costs a torpid bat roughly 108 mg of fat — the equivalent of 68 days of normal torpor — and WNS-infected bats already arouse three to four times more often than healthy ones. Traditional cave survey compounds a mortality problem the surveyor is trying to solve.
Torpid Myotis cluster along ceiling ribs that a headlamp cannot survey without rousing them. EchoQuilt reads the ribs, the spall, and the cluster outline from passive drip and airflow sound, so the roost geometry arrives without the cost of a visit.
Terrestrial LiDAR gives centimeter accuracy but requires a biologist to stand inside a torpid cluster and fire pulses every few seconds. EchoQuilt builds a comparable roost map from ambient drip and airflow sound, removing the scanner, the lights, and the arousal cascade from the workflow.