BC Community Bat Program and NABat Monitoring – Project Updates
Wednesday October 23, 2019 12:00pm-1:00pm
The Smithers Art Gallery - Smithers, BC
Please note the change of venue: This seminar will be hosted at The Smithers Art Gallery (this week only).
About this presentation
The BC Community Bat Program is a network of community bat projects across BC, carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Environment. The goals of this network are to: Increase the number of known roost sites in human-made structures, encourage landowners to protect their bat roost sites or use bat-friendly exclusion methods, promote the Annual Bat Count to monitor bat populations, and enhance bat habitat by encouraging the installation and monitoring of bat-houses. NABat is multi-agency initiative being administered by the US Geological Survey (USGS), designed to increase baseline monitoring at the national and continental scale.
About Ashleigh Ballevona, R.P.Bio.
Ashleigh is an environmental consultant based in Smithers and has special interest in bats. Since 2015 Ashleigh has volunteered as the BC Community Bat Program Coordinator for the Skeena Region, and in 2016 she began volunteering with the North American Bat Monitoring Program in BC.
Relevance in Northwest BC
White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) is a fungal disease that results in high mortality of susceptible bat species. It has not yet been detected in BC but occurs in nearby Washington State and is expected in BC in the near future. NABat aims to collect critical baseline data to inform conservation and management decisions on immediate and long-term scales and is especially critical to establish in advance of the arrival of WNS. The BC Annual Bat Count offers good potential for monitoring population trends in some species of bat that use human structures for roosting and is currently the only long-term roost monitoring program in the province.
