Training dataset for NABat Machine Learning V1.0

Bats play crucial ecological roles and provide valuable ecosystem services, yet many populations face serious threats from various ecological disturbances. The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) aims to assess status and trends of bat populations while developing innovative and community-driven conservation solutions using its unique data and technology infrastructure. To support scalability and transparency in the NABat acoustic data pipeline, we developed a fully-automated machine-learning algorithm. This dataset includes audio files of bat echolocation calls that were considered to develop V1.0 of the NABat machine-learning algorithm, however the test set (i.e., holdout dataset) has been excluded from this release. These recordings were collected by various bat monitoring partners across North America using ultrasonic acoustic recorders for stationary acoustic and mobile acoustic surveys. For more information on how these surveys may be conducted, see Chapters 4 and 5 of “A Plan for the North American Bat Monitoring Program” (https://doi.org/10.2737/SRS-GTR-208). These data were then post-processed by bat monitoring partners to remove noise files (or those that do not contain recognizable bat calls) and apply a species label to each file. There is undoubtedly variation in the steps that monitoring partners take to apply a species label, but the steps documented in “A Guide to Processing Bat Acoustic Data for the North American Bat Monitoring Program” (https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20181068) include first processing with an automated classifier and then manually reviewing to confirm or downgrade the suggested species label. Once a manual ID label was applied, audio files