Award Abstract #0326483
ITR: Advanced Imaging and Information Technology for Assessing the Ecological and Economic Impact of Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats on Agroecosystems

NSF Org:	IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
Initial Amendment Date:	September 16, 2003
Latest Amendment Date:	July 31, 2007
Award Number:	0326483
Award Instrument:	Continuing grant
Program Manager:	Sylvia J. Spengler IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems CSE Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering
Start Date:	September 15, 2003
Expires:	August 31, 2009 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$2496305
Investigator(s):	Thomas Kunz kunz@bu.edu (Principal Investigator) Gary McCracken (Co-Principal Investigator) Margrit Betke (Co-Principal Investigator) John Westbrook (Co-Principal Investigator) Patricia Morton (Co-Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	Trustees of Boston University 881 COMMONWEALTH AVE BOSTON, MA 02215 617/353-4365
NSF Program(s):	ROBUST INTELLIGENCE, INFO INTEGRATION & INFORMATICS, ITR MEDIUM (GROUP) GRANTS, BE: NON-ANNOUNCEMENT RESEARCH
Field Application(s):	0000099 Other Applications NEC, 0104000 Information Systems
Program Reference Code(s):	SMET, HPCC, 9251, 9218, 9178, 1687, 1652
Program Element Code(s):	7495, 7364, 1687, 1629

ABSTRACT



Intellectual Merit of the Proposed Activity

Millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) voraciously consume enormous quantities of insects each summer night throughout the southwestern United States. These bats provide an agricultural pest control service little understood by the scientific community and policy makers. The proposed effort will evaluate the nationwide ecological and economic impact of this species on both natural and agricultural ecosystems. The project is innovative in its development of information technology and unique in its complexity and scale. It requires the collaborative efforts of computer scientists, applied mathematicians, meteorologists, ecologists, and ecological economists. Proposed activities involve:

1. Sensing Technologies.-Design, develop, deploy, and evaluate algorithms and systems for thermal, ultrasonic, and radar sensing of millions of bats and insect pests. Such algorithms and systems currently do not exist but are crucial for providing a reliable census of the nationwide free-tailed bat populations and processes. Computer vision techniques will be developed to analyze nightly emergence, flight paths, and foraging behaviors of individuals and groups of bats.

2. Computational Modeling.-Design, develop, solve, and validate computational models of the agricultural-insects-bats system across temporal and spatial scales. Processes at lower levels of organization, such as the individual bat and its physiological functions, will be analyzed to solve problems posed at higher ecological levels of organization from the population to the landscape. Local population models for particular caves or bridges will be generalized to a spatially explicit regional model for Texas, and then to a spatially explicit landscape model that describes the nationwide impact of Brazilian free-tailed bats on agricultural ecosystems. Currently, no complete individual or population life-history models exist for free-tailed bats nor, indeed, for any bat species, in spite of the fact bats are ubiquitous throughout the world and are distinguished as the second largest order of mammals.

3. System Integration.-The proposed models will be integrated using both conceptual and spatial hierarchies. Results provided by the sensing technologies will be combined to represent the processes of foraging and migration. The integration of these outcomes as well as molecular tools (such as fecal DNA), entomological and agricultural information, energetics, meteorological and toxicological databases, will provide input parameters and validation data to computational models of bat populations. The models will integrate the interdependencies of dietary factors, energy consumption and allocation, weather patterns, effects of toxicants, etc. on birth and mortality rates and population sizes of bats and their prey.

Broader Impacts Resulting from the Proposed Activity

The importance of natural pest-control services becomes evident often only when they are degraded or eliminated by human activity. The proposed research will provide realistic estimates of the economic impact of Brazilian free-tailed bats. The proposed techniques may generalize to other species and thus have a broad impact in the fields of biology, ecology, ecological economics, and agriculture. The proposed methods of image analysis may apply to other large-scale video tracking applications, for instance, the analysis of group behavior of other bat species, insects, herding mammals (e.g., seals, caribou), colonial seabirds, the analysis of human crowd behavior, data mining of video of human motion, and video surveillance for homeland security. An important impact of the proposed research on society will be the development appropriate policy responses by federal, state, or local authorities based on the fundamentally improved understanding of the underlying biological and economic principles of natural pest control. The proposed effort addresses the goals of the ITR Program in a number of ways. It is multidisciplinary in nature, providing a new bridge between the fields of computational sciences and ecology. This may lead to novel, unanticipated insights and technologies in both fields. The proposed effort will train students in biology and computer science to fully integrate information technology and science. Graduate and undergraduate students from both disciplines will learn to conduct joint field experiments, analyze data, and work with computational models. The projects in computer science that are inspired by questions in biology promise to have a special appeal to women, and we expect that our project will encourage more women to explore the computational aspects of biology.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Betke, M., D.E. Hirsh, A. Bagchi, N.I. Hristov, N.C. Makris, and T.H. Kunz..  "Tracking large variable numbers of objects in clutter.,"  Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),,  2007, 

Betke, M., D.E. Hirsh, A. Bagchi, N.I. Hristov, N.C. Makris, and T.H. Kunz..  "Tracking large variable numbers of objects in clutter.,"  Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),,  2007,  p. 1.

Betke, M., D.E. Hirsh, N.C. Makris, G. F. McCracken, M. Procopio, N.I. Hristov, S. Tang, A. Bagchi, J. Reichard, J.W. Horn, S. Crampton, C.J. Cleveland, and T.H. Kunz..  "Thermal imaging reveals significantly smaller Brazilian free-tailed bat colonies than previously estimated.,"  Journal of Mammalogy,  v.89,  2008,  p. 18.

Cleveland, C.J., J.D. Frank, P. Federico, I. Gomez, T.G Hallam, J. Horn, T.H. Kunz, J. Lopez, G.F. McCracken, R.A. Medellin, A.Moreno-V, C. Sasone, and J.K. Westbrook..  "Economic value of the pest control service provided by Brazilian free-tailed bat in south-central Texas.,"  Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment,,  v.4,  2006,  p. 238.

Federico, P., T. G. Hallam, G.F. McCracken, S. T. Purucker, W.E. Grant, A. Correa Sandoval, J. K. Westbrook, R.A. Medellín, C.J. Cleveland, C.G. Sansone, J.D. López Jr., M.Betke, A. Moreno-Valdez, T.H. Kunz..  "Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) as insect predators in transgenic and conventional cotton crops,"  Ecological Applications,  v.18,  2008,  p. 826.

Gillam, E. H.  "Eavesdropping by bats on the feeding buzzes of conspecifics,"  Canadian Journal of Zoology,  v.85,  2007,  p. 795.

Gillam, E.H. and G.F. McCracken.  "Variability in the echolocation of Brazilian free-tailed bats, Tadarida brasiliensis: effects of geography and local acoustic environment.,"  Animal Behaviour,  v.74,  2007,  p. 277.

Gillam, E.H., N. Ulanovsky, and G.F. McCracke.  "Rapid jamming avoidance in biosonar.,"  Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B,  2006, 

Gillam, E.H., N. Ulanovsky, and G.F. McCracken.  "Rapid jamming avoidance in biosonar.,"  Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B,  v.274,  2006,  p. 651.

Hallam, T.G. and Q. Deng.  "Simulation of structured populations in chemically stressed environments,"  Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering,  v.3,  2005,  p. 51.

Horn, J.W., and T.H. Kunz.  "Analyzing NEXRAD Doppler radar images to assess nightly dispersal patterns and population trends in Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis),"  Integrative and Comparative Biology,  2008, 

Hristov, N.I., M. Betke, and T.H. Kunz.  "Applications of thermal infrared imaging for research in aeroecology,"  Integrative and Comparative Biology,  2008, 

Kunz T.H., S.A. Gauthreaux, Jr., N.I. Hristov, J.W. Horn, G. Jones, E.K.V. Kalko, R.P. Larkin, G.F. McCracken, S.W. Swartz, R.B. Srygley, R. Dudley, J.K. Westbrook, and M. Wikelski.  "Aeroecology: probing and modelling the aerosphere,"  Integrative and Comparative Biology,  2008, 

Kunz, T.H., E.B. Arnett, B.M. Cooper, W.P. Erickson, R.P. Larkin, T. Mabee, M.L. Morrison, M.D. Strickland, and J.M. Szewczak.  "Assessing impacts of wind energy development on nocturnally active birds and bats: a guidance document,"  Journal of Wildlife Management,  v.71,  2007,  p. 2449.

Lee, Y-F and G.F. McCracken.  "Dietary variation of Brazilian free-tailed bats links to migratory populations of pest insects,"  Journal of Mammalogy,  v.86,  2005,  p. 67.

McCracken, G.F., E.H. Gillam, J.K. Westbrook, Y.F. Lee, M.L. Jensen, and B.B. Balsley.  "Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis: Molossidae, Chiroptera) at high altitude: links to migratory insect populations,"  Integrative and Comparative Biology,  2008, 

Westbrook, J.K.  "Noctuid migration in Texas within the nocturnal aeroecological boundary layer,"  Integrative and Comparative Biology,  2008, 


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