Research Update: "How many bats are there?"
CPI Research Fellow Presents at Ecological Society of America Conference
"How many bats are there?"
This seemingly simple question has been the central force driving of Sarah Lagattuta's research efforts for the past four years. Bat species play critical roles in global disease dynamics, and understanding their populations is key to developing predictive models for emerging infectious disease risk. But how do we accurately count the bats ourselves, and better yet, how do we leverage machine learning to count them for us? This work was recently presented at the Ecological Society of America 2025 Annual Meeting in a talk titled, "Advancements in non-invasive bat surveillance: Integrating thermal imagery and multi-object tracking machine learning models for censusing bats in diverse, human-made roost environments."
Read more about Sarah's work on the NSF Center for Pandemic Insights website.
