Cotswold Water Park Bat Atlas

The Bat Atlas can be downloaded at:     http://www.waterpark.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CWP-Bat-Atlas-v6-FINAL-sm61.pdf

 

“The Cotswold Water Park Bat Initiative has been running for over 10 years.   . During this time a lot of people have done a lot of bat survey work across the CWP (thank you to you all). During this time however, the only publications produced have been the annual project newsletters for volunteers and landowners and although all of the bat data we produce is shared with the local records centres, we have not previously produced an interpretation of what we have found thus far.

 

Thanks to some funding from Lower Mill Estate (administered by Cotswold District Council) we have recently been able to compile all of the data so far into one document. Working with the WSBRC we have been able to include maps for field records and roost records for each species (all 14 species) recorded so far.

 

This document represents simply an interim report of bat survey and monitoring undertaken thus far (we’ve not finished yet!).  This interim report, which grew into something larger than originally intended (!!) is the first formal publication arising from this project. It is hoped that these data and this interpretation can feed into forthcoming local policies and planning decisions (with indications that this is already happening). 

 

Thank you to all those who contributed to this publication and helped to improve earlier drafts, in particular, Eric Palmer, Jenny Bennett, Will Ponting and Ben Welbourn. But in particular thank you to many of the bat workers who helped us with the surveys in the first place. Furthermore, thank you to all of the numerous funders, landowners and householders who supported these surveys by enabling purchase of equipment and training, access to land and roosting sites for generally supporting this bat conservation in the CWP.”        Gareth Harris.