Bat call monitoring and activity report app
Wind farm bat monitoring runs on passive ultrasonic detectors left at turbine bases, met masts and reference sites for weeks at a time. The field visit is a detector service — swap cards, check batteries, confirm the microphone — and the report is a nightly activity summary per detector, once the call files have been through your analysis software. The common failure is a detector that recorded nothing for nine nights and nobody noticed until the report was due.
Built for wind developers running teams of roughly 3–50 inspectors.
Sample Bat activity report
An illustrative excerpt. The site, readings and findings are fictional; the layout is yours to set.
Bat activity report
Table 2 — Detector deployment and nights recorded, autumn round
- Project
- Fictional Ridge Wind Farm, operational monitoring
- Round
- Autumn 2026, deployment 3
- Call analysis
- Identified externally; results imported per detector
| Detector / location | Nights deployed vs recorded | Status |
|---|---|---|
| D01 — T07 nacelle-height mast | 28 / 28 | Status: Pass |
| D02 — T12 turbine base | 28 / 19 (microphone fault from 22 Apr) | Status: Data gap |
| D03 — Reference gully, 2 km east | 28 / 28 | Status: Pass |
| D04 — T21 turbine base | 28 / 28; card 91% full at retrieval | Status: Swap sooner |
Fields captured on site
Your firm builds the form in-app, so these are a starting point rather than a fixed schema. Every field is captured on the device, with or without signal, and lands in the bat activity report where your template puts it.
Per detector service
- Detector ID (barcode scan)
- Linked location
- Microphone height and orientation
- Battery voltage
- Card swapped (yes / no)
- Photo of the mounting
Per round summary
- Nights deployed
- Nights with valid recordings
- Fault notes and date of failure
Imported results
- Species or call group
- Passes per night
- Analyst and identification confidence
Standards the report works to
- Commonwealth survey guidelinesSurvey guidelines for Australia’s threatened bats
- The guidance a report cites for detector effort and the limits of call-based identification for listed species.
- EPBC Act 1999Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth)
- Where a listed bat is a matter of national significance, the project’s approval conditions set what the monitoring has to show.
Load the standards you hold into your reference library and the drafted prose is written against them rather than against a general model.
How the bat activity report gets built
Capture it once, offline
Your firm builds the bat call monitoring form in-app — 25 field types, nesting repeatable groups, compound AND/OR visibility rules, reusable modules and calculated fields. Field capture works with no signal: jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio all queue in an idempotent outbox that only clears once the server confirms receipt.
Link it to your sites, transects and plots
Enter sites, transects and plots once, as a register. Every one of your species observations and survey events then points at a stored row rather than a name somebody typed — and the links survive a disconnected device.
Render your own template
The bat activity report renders into the Word template you already use — your letterhead, your section order, your clause library — with conditionals, loops over repeats, composable sub-templates and photo grids.
Reviewed before it leaves
You write the review framework: a checklist of what a bat activity report must contain, plus the prose standards you would mark a junior against. Link it to a report template and it runs every time that template renders. Each finding comes back graded info, minor or major, quoting the sentence at fault, and a person accepts or dismisses every one.
Because the structured submission behind the report is held too, the review is a comparison rather than a proofread: The report concludes no threatened species were recorded; the survey event on Transect 3 carries an observation that says otherwise.
Checks a ecology framework usually carries
- Survey effort described meets the guideline for the species being assessed
- Every species in the results table is carried through to the discussion
- Weather, season and access limitations are recorded, not left implied
- Each approval or offset condition is addressed explicitly
Questions
- Does SurveyThanks analyse the call files?
- No. Call identification stays in your analysis software. SurveyThanks records each detector service in the field and holds the per-night results you bring back, so the report draws on both.
- How do we catch a detector that failed mid-deployment?
- Record nights deployed and nights recorded on every service; a calculated field shows the shortfall, and a visibility rule can require a fault note whenever the two differ.
- Can detectors move between turbines over a season?
- Yes. Detectors and locations are separate records, so a unit redeployed from T12 to T15 keeps its own service history while each location keeps its own activity series.
What this is not
Worth knowing before you book a demo, so neither of us wastes the half hour.
- Not field-service dispatch. No timesheets, no parts, no inventory. Scheduling exists to get an inspector to a site.
- No signature capture. If your deliverable has to carry a signed sign-off on the artefact itself, this is not the tool yet.
- Field capture is what works offline — jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio. Reports, chat, scheduling and the inbox need a connection.
- No client portal. Reports go out as a file or a password-protected link.
Other ecology work we cover
- Koala habitat assessmentsKoala habitat report
- Marine mammal observationsMMO shift report
- Nest box monitoringNest box occupancy report
- Pre-clearance ecology surveysClearance survey report
- Revegetation monitoringPlanting survival report
- Seagrass monitoringSeagrass condition report
- Shorebird countsShorebird census report
- Threatened species monitoringSpecies monitoring report
Other disciplines
Rebuild your bat activity report in SurveyThanks
Bring the Word template you already send clients. If you are coming off another field-forms tool, a filled report can be uploaded, read field by field, and re-rendered into your template.