Seminar: The Southwest Bat Hub: Collaborative monitoring and conservation in Arizona and New Mexico

Abstract:

The Southwest Bat Hub was established in 2021 to unite attempts by state and federal agencies to coordinate data collection to inform population-level understanding of the region’s bats. The Southwest Hub serves Arizona and New Mexico (www.southwestbats.org). In the Southwest, there is an urgent need to understand the impacts of threats on bat populations, such as drought, fire and disease. Prior to the establishment of the Hub, the region had low participation in the North American Bat Monitoring Program despite being a hot spot for bat diversity. Monitoring in the first 3 years of the Hub being established has more than tripled prior years efforts. Partners for this project include the USFWS, US Forest Service (USFS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Tribal agencies, National Park Service (NPS), and local conservation groups. The Hub aims to facilitate the collection of consistent data and provide data products back to these partners to inform management. The Hub’s services reduce the barriers to participation faced by partners, and include equipment sharing, data processing and management, training, and survey coordination and planning. The network of partners cultivated by the Hub is key in continuing to increase and enable survey efforts to generate sufficient data to provide both spatial and temporal coverage. Ultimately, this collaborative approach is necessary to develop robust status and trend modeling outputs to inform the management and conservation of Southwest bat populations.

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