Wildlife Acoustics Announces GPS Capabilities for Transect Surveys

New GPS integration combines acoustic and location data

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Oct 27, 2010, 12:01 ET

DENVER, Oct. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- 40th North American Symposium on Bat Research -- Wildlife Acoustics, the leading supplier of acoustic monitoring systems for wildlife around the world, announces new capabilities for transect surveys of bats, birds, frogs and other species. With the latest firmware update to the GPS-enabled Song Meter SM2™, latitude and longitude coordinates with 15 meter accuracy are stored in audio recordings once each second. The company's latest Song Scope™ software can then be used to scroll through spectrograms of the recordings and simultaneously display the corresponding GPS coordinates.

For ultrasonic recordings of bats, the company's latest Wac2Wav™ software generates a log with GPS coordinates for each triggered event, or bat pass. Wac2Wav can output standard WAV files or legacy zero-crossing files. When creating zero-crossing files, the GPS coordinates are automatically loaded into the corresponding file headers so that they are available to third-party zero-crossing analysis software.

"We have customers who drive transect routes recording bat activity as they go," said Ian Agranat, President and CEO of Wildlife Acoustics. "With our GPS option and latest SM2 firmware, the location of each detected bat pass is now fully integrated automatically thus eliminating hours of tedious effort manually correlating separate recording and location data."

Recordings made with the GPS option are also time-synchronized to within one millisecond of GPS time. This makes it possible to configure an array of recorders that can be used to precisely measure sound propagation across many microphones to determine the location of a sound source.

About Wildlife Acoustics, Inc.

A wildly innovative company:

Wildlife Acoustics, Inc., a privately held Massachusetts corporation, is the leading provider of bio-acoustic monitoring technology for scientists, researchers and government agencies worldwide since 2003.

www.wildlifeacoustics.com

SOURCE Wildlife Acoustics, Inc.