Wildlife Acoustics Offers Bat Researchers Both Full-spectrum and Zero-crossing Capabilities

New software makes SM2BAT recordings compatible with competing bat analysis software and protocols

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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 its latest version 3.0 of the Wac2Wav™ software. This software post-processes WAC recording files created by the Song Meter SM2BAT™ ultrasonic recorders to prepare them for analysis by various third-party zero-crossing and full-spectrum analysis tools.

"Our new Wac2Wav software makes the SM2BAT recorder backward compatible with incumbent competitive solutions employing zero-crossing, time-expansion and full-spectrum technologies," said Ian Agranat, President and CEO of Wildlife Acoustics. "We recognize the investments our customers have made in developing long-term monitoring protocols and now offer an easy migration path to our SM2BAT ultrasonic recorder."

For zero-crossing analysis, the Wac2Wav software converts full-spectrum recordings made by SM2BAT into files compatible with the leading zero-crossing bat detectors. The sensitivity can be set to a specific level, or Wac2Wav can automatically adjust the level for each bat pass to maximize bat detection rates. If the SM2 GPS option is used, GPS latitude and longitude coordinates are also automatically stored in the zero-crossing file headers for transect surveys, and also logged to a text file.

To achieve equivalent temporal coverage of competing time-expansion detectors, Wac2Wav software can truncate recordings to a specified length and ignore recordings made while a time-expansion detector would not have been monitoring.

And finally, for full-spectrum analysis, the Wac2Wav software can split each bat pass into its own WAV file compatible with nearly all third-party acoustic analysis tools.

Wac2Wav software also features a noise filter to optionally remove triggered events unlikely to contain bat activity, and a compensation filter to adjust the SMX-US microphone frequency response to improve automatic classification performance of third-party classifiers based on reference calls made by other systems.

"Our SM2BAT ultrasonic recorders are fully weatherproof, detect more bats and at a fraction of the cost of any other bat detector on the worldwide market today," Agranat continued. "Combined with our Wac2Wav software, we are compatible with all the work-flows and analysis tools developed around incumbent competing products including both full-spectrum and zero-crossing technologies. With superior price performance and an easy migration path, we are quickly becoming the new standard for the unattended acoustic monitoring of bats worldwide."

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.