The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) is a multi-national, multi-agency coordinated bat monitoring program across North America. The overall NABat effort provides the biological, administrative, and statistical architecture for coordinated bat population monitoring to support regional and range-wide inferences about changes in the distributions and abundances of bat populations facing current and emerging threats. Data management and centralized data storage capabilities are integral to the success of the NABat Program. As such, the NABat Coordinating Office has developed a web-based application that provides IT infrastructure for the international monitoring program, including cloud-hosted data management solutions for NABat partners, real-time data exploration, and data summary and mapping tools. The NABat Coordinating Office hosts a central database where partners may upload, store, archive, and make available data files using the DOI approved Cloud Hosting Solution (Amazon Web Services). Below, we maintain a record of the major database version changes. Data releases will be conducted with corresponding product releases that result from data analyses and interpretation and in compliance with USGS Fundamental Science Practices and the NABat Data Use and Sharing Agreement.
Accessing the Data
These data are preliminary or provisional and are subject to revision. They are being provided to meet the need for timely best science. The data have not received final approval by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and are provided on the condition that neither the USGS nor the U.S. Government shall be held liable for any damages resulting from the authorized or unauthorized use of the data.
Data use and sharing is determined at the NABat project level by the project leader. Data contributors retain ownership of their data, including control over who may access those data. Some data either are not available or have limited availability owing to restrictions related to the sensitive nature of endangered species records and concerns about potentrial persecution of bats. Contact the NABat project leader as identified for more information. Data sharing options are more thoroughly detailed here: https://sciencebase.usgs.gov/nabat/assets/NABat%20General%20Terms%20and%20Conditions.pdf
Third-party users may request access to NABat data through the Partner Portal (https://sciencebase.usgs.gov/nabat/#/home). To do so, requestors must create an account, login to the Partner Portal, and navigate to the 'Data Inventory.' Users first filter for species, survey type and region of interest, and then click "Request Data." The NABat Coordinating Office facilitates request for approval from the relevant data owners. A public record of each request is maintained on the Partner Portal for reference and users may review previously submitted requests at https://sciencebase.usgs.gov/nabat/#/data/requests/all.
When third party requestors recieve data from the NABat database, 4 files are provided in a .zip folder:
(1) citation.txt: a text file with a recommended citation that follows the following format - North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) Database vX.X.XX (Provisional Release): U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD. NABat Request Number XXX. https://doi.org/10.5066/P9UXA6CF
(2) data.csv: a .csv file of the data
(3) metadata.json: a metadata dictionary defining all the fields provided in the .csv
(4) README.md: a text file explaing each file that has been provided
Version History
The version history of the NABat database is self documenting and publicly available on the NABat Partner Portal by navigating to https://sciencebase.usgs.gov/nabat/#/about and clicking on "See Previous Database Versions."
Metadata
Metadata definitions are publicly available at https://sciencebase.usgs.gov/nabat/#/metadata.
