Review Sample Data for Bat and Noise Characteristics - SMART System

To design effective alarms, you need to look for patterns in the types of bat calls and types of non-bat noise that any particular microphone is recording.

1. Vet your recordings to identify bat species and also mark any recordings that contained non-bat noise.
2. Using a spreadsheet processor, look for patterns in call parameters that could be used to distinguish bats from noise.

   Imagine a common type of noise in your recordings produces shorter pulses than low-frequency bats, but narrower bandwidth than high-frequency bats. One strategy for distinguishing between bat calls and noise would be to create separate alarms for low- and high-frequency bats.

   The low-frequency alarm would look for sounds only up to a certain maximum frequency with pulses longer than a certain duration.

   The high-frequency alarm would look for sounds above a minimum frequency, wider than a specific bandwidth.