Monday 14th November starting at 7.0 pm.

Dr. Jon Whitehurst will be talking about ‘Bats, Maths and Maps’.

He will explain how ecology today is a cross discipline subject using his work on bat monitoring as an example.

Here is some information that Jon has supplied about himself and the talk:

What do bats, maths and maps have in common with systems engineering you ask yourself? The answer in this case lies in developing repeatable methodologies for the accurate prediction of bat habitat suitability using non-invasive survey methods.

The intent of this lecture is to show the extent to which cross discipline working is exploited within modern day ecology and to demonstrate that the ecology research in the 21st century is not just about fieldwork, recording and subjective assessment.

The specific example presented is bat habitat suitability modelling and the lecture will cover the end-to-end process of mapping predictive bat habitat use and describe the contributions to this process from across a wide range of scientific disciplines that enable field observations and digitised habitat features into fully quantifiable predictions of bat habitat use.

Lecturer Background
Dr Jon Whitehurst is a chartered engineer by profession and fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, working in the area of complex system architecting and implementation onto naval ships by day.

He is the Operations Officer for the Isle of Wight Bat Group and architect of “The Parkhurst Forest Bat Project” and the currently running “Isle of Wight Bat Project”, and has lectured at national level on the topics of bat habitat suitability modelling and acoustic woodland bat survey methods, and also worked with Leeds University on computer recognition of bat echolocation calls in support of the DEFRA woodland bat survey protocols programme.