One of the aims of the Batting4Bayside microbat project is to get some idea as to which species of bat may be found in which area of Bayside. We asked Anabat borrowers to use the Anabat's voice recording feature to record their location to enable us to match bat records with location.
Using the Anabat's voice recording feature has not been as successful for this purpose as we hoped. Some recordings are too garbled or quiet for us to understand, and some people forgot to record anything. Even when recording location in this way did work as planned, we found that assigning location to a bat record was very time consuming: as yet not all locations that could be assigned have been assigned.
As a result we have a lot of bat records with location "Unknown". Some of these we will work through and assign over the next few months. Others we may contact the recorder and ask if they can remember where they were. And others will be forever "Unknown".
Despite this, we do have interesting and informative numbers on which bats can be found where in Bayside.
| Location | Gould's Wattled Bat | Chocolate Wattled Bat | Eastern Bentwing-bat | Large-footed Myotis | Lesser Long-eared Bat | White-striped Freetail Bat | Little Forest Bat |
| Basterfield Park | 3 | 11 | 12 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 19 |
| Cheltenham Golf Course | 91 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 6 |
| Cheltenham Library | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Cheltenham Park | 19 | 5 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Cullinane St, Black Rock | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Deakin St North, Hampton | 17 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dendy Park | 15 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 13 |
| Elsternwick Park | 10 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Erskine Ave, Cheltenham | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Foreshore nr Bay Road | 14 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Glebe Ave, Cheltenham | 297 | 19 | 21 | 5 | 4 | 115 | 28 |
| Halfmoon Bay | 9 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Heather Grove, Cheltenham | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Keating St, Beaumaris | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Landcox Park | 4 | 9 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 22 |
| Long Hollow | 47 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| Merindah Park | 7 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 14 |
| Pobblebonk Park | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sandringham Golf Course | 0 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sandringham Road | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sir William Fry Reserve | 1 | 14 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 12 |
| Spring St | 28 | 3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 13 |
| Union St Reserve | 4 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Unknown | 399 | 92 | 38 | 14 | 6 | 4 | 151 |
| Victoria St, Sandringham | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
Clearly Gould's Wattled Bat (Chalinolobus gouldii) is the most recorded microbat in most locations in Bayside. So those locations that have very small numbers of this species compared to other species may deserve extra attention. Perhaps those locations are more important to bat diversity? Or perhaps the records were collected at times or during weather less favourable to Gould's Wattled Bat than the other species?
Of course, the totals listed here cannot be used to determine which areas are more popular with bats. Some of these locations were visited repeatedly by multiple people, and the totals cover many hours over several months. Other locations may have been visited by one person for an hour or less. However this data does give us an idea of which species may be found in Bayside, how widely distributed they are, and relative numbers of species.
We plan to use this information, in combination with other results extracted from the data collected so far, to assist planning future more targetted data collection and analysis. For now, there is still a lot of interesting information to be extracted from the data we have. Watch for future reports as we continue to analyse the Batting4Bayside data collected by our volunteers.
