Tropical Bat Call Detection and Classification

Teaching machines to recognise bats by their calls — so citizen scientists across Cambodia can map species no one has counted.

70+ species recorded

5 new to science

Citizen-science powered

Machine LearningBio Acoustics

Bats are a familiar sight across Cambodia — colonies of fruit bats such as Lyle’s flying fox, one of 31 species endemic to southeast Asia, roost in the trees of pagodas and national monuments. Cambodia is even the only country in the world with a living tradition of bat-guano cultivation. Yet for all their visibility, bats are among the country’s least-studied animals — and that gap in knowledge makes them hard to protect.

Why bats matter

As pollinators, seed-dispersers and pest-controllers, bats quietly keep tropical ecosystems — and the farms that depend on them — running.

Pest control

A single colony devours vast numbers of insects every night, protecting rice and other crops — naturally, without pesticides.

Seed dispersal

Fruit bats carry seeds far across the landscape as they forage, helping regenerate forests and the fruit trees people rely on.

Pollination

Many tropical plants — including valuable fruit trees — depend on bats to pollinate their night-blooming flowers.

Under pressure

Cambodia’s bats face mounting pressure, and a shortage of data leaves them especially exposed. Tap each to learn more.

Habitat loss
Pesticides
Hunting & trade
Knowledge gap

Rapidly disappearing roosts and foraging grounds shrink the spaces bats need to feed, breed and shelter.

Heavy pesticide use poisons the insects bats feed on — and the bats themselves.

Bats are taken for the illegal bushmeat and traditional-medicine trades, thinning already fragile populations.

With so little research published, species can decline — or vanish — before they are ever documented.

Hidden diversity

Just ten years ago, only 30 bat species were recorded in Cambodia — against more than 100 each in neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam. Today the count is over 70, five of them new to science. One, the Hayes’ thick-thumbed myotis, was identified only recently after being caught in the heart of Phnom Penh.

What more is waiting to be found?

– Cambodian Urban Bat Project

From a call to a species

The Cambodian Urban Bat Project puts that question to citizen scientists. Volunteers walk and ride transects through a diversity of urban spaces — and run stationary recordings in the hotspots their surveys reveal — capturing the ultrasonic calls bats use to navigate in the dark.

How it works — a bat’s ultrasonic call is recorded in the field, rendered as a spectrogram, then classified to species by a machine-learning model Each recording is turned into a spectrogram — a picture of sound — and a model reads that picture to identify the species behind the call.

Together with Citibats Cambodia, we’re building bioacoustics tools that turn those recordings into species. The model lets researchers classify the huge volume of calls the community gathers, and share the results openly on iNaturalist for further research by anyone, anywhere.

It’s a blueprint for community-powered conservation: low-cost recorders, volunteer effort and open data adding up to a clearer picture of Cambodia’s bats — and a faster route to protecting them.