Today is National Bat Appreciation Day!
North American bats are an important part of our natural world and vital to our economy due to the importance they play in pest control and pollination of native and agricultural plants. However, bats are facing unprecedented threats including habitat loss, fragmentation, and disease.
USGS is part of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat), an international interagency effort designed to monitor bat distributions and abundances on public and private lands, and provide data at the state, provincial, tribal, regional, and range-wide scales.
There are currently no national programs to monitor and track bat populations in North America, and NABat seeks to assist in development of such programs that will provide managers and policy makers with the information they need to effectively manage bat populations, detect early warning signs of population declines and estimate extinction risk.
NABat was developed in conjunction with specialists from other agencies, universities and NGOs in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Mexico.
Find out more about NABat: https://www.usgs.gov/
Image of a spotted bat by Paul Cryan, USGS.
#USGS #science #nationalbatappreciationda
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