Kading’s team depends on a Ugandan team led by Robert Kityo, a natural history biologist at Makerere University and the author of the East African Bat Atlas. While Kading focuses on biosurveillance and virus discovery, Kityo focuses on bat ecology and conservation.
Bats provide many ecosystem services as predators, prey, pollinators, and seed dispersers. As ecotourism and other economic pressures increase human-bat interactions, it becomes even more urgent to understand and protect bats and their habitats.
“We want to know what species of bats are in which caves? What lives in there with them? What are they eating? Who is going into the caves? What are their interactions with the bats? What is the relationship between bat habitats and local communities?” Kityo said.
Acoustic monitoring is essential to identifying species and understanding population distribution and movement. Kityo’s team and the Uganda Wildlife Authority aim to create a comprehensive library of bats and bat calls in Uganda. There are 110 known bat species in Uganda, but new species continue to emerge. Kityo’s team leads the bat capture and tagging efforts, and they also record bat calls in and around the caves.