As white-nose syndrome and other threats have decimated bat populations in North America, the need to understand bat roosting affinities and population dynamics becomes more critical. Our knowledge of bats’ roosting habitat has been biased by what locations are easily accessible to humans, such as caves, mines, and anthropogenic structures. A citizen science project, Climbers for Bat Conservation, is using recreational climbers to identify bat roosting habitat that is typically outside of human reach. Started in 2014, CBC has developed collaborations with some of the largest climbing advocacy and conservation groups in the world, including Access Fund, American Alpine Club, The Climbing Initiative, and Petzl. CBC has nearly 300 records of bats along cliffs and rocks from U.S., Bulgaria, Italy, Norway, and Kenya. Passively-collected observations continue to feed CBC’s database, but active climbing surveys are now being implemented to look for bats and identify roosts. Utilizing recreational citizen-science data CBC is opening new avenues to investigate bat habitat and locate bat populations.

Robert Schorr is a conservation biologist at the Colorado State University where he studies rare species ecology and population dynamics. He grew up in northern California, attended UC Davis, and started his biological career hooting for spotted owls. He has worked at CSU for 27 years studying the natural history and population ecology of rare or poorly-studied mammals and dabbling in population modeling of rare birds, reptiles, amphibians, and plants.