Wildlife Acoustics Inc., a supplier of acoustic monitoring systems for endangered and threatened wildlife species, has released the latest version of its terrestrial ultrasonic passive acoustic recorder – the Song Meter SM2BAT+ – which can be used to monitor bat activity on wind farms.
According to the company, the Song Meter SM2BAT+ now records natively in zero-crossing mode, without requiring post-processing conversion. These files are not digitally created but instead use zero-crossing hardware. In zero-crossing mode, bat biologists can record over a month of nightly recordings using only the internal D batteries and expect a 32 GB card to last for any deployment length.
The company also says it reduced the post-data analysis time by enabling onboard filtering of triggered recordings. The SM2BAT+ in full spectrum mode now automatically eliminates irrelevant files that don't have bat activity, and the recordings are saved directly as WAV files and opened directly in analysis software without any conversion, Wildlife Acoustics explains.
