The ecology and management of microbats is a particular specialty of the company director, Alison Martin, who currently is developing industry guidelines, in conjunction with another colleague, for the specific management of microbats in linear infrastructure.

Many species of microbats roost and breed in the cracks and crevices available in aging timbers and concrete in bridges and culverts. As such, remediation work on these structures often requires careful management to relocate bats so they are not injured by the works process. Greenloaning has offered professional expertise with microbat management planning for the Roads and Maritime Services for the Glebe Bridge upgrade and culvert relining project in Woodburn.

Alison also has worked extensively on a number of other long term microbat monitoring projects in collaboration with bat specialist, Dr Greg Richards, including 10 years of remote call monitoring of 10 threatened species for the Shannon Creek Water Storage project, NSW, seven years of physical and remote call monitoring of cave bats in an extensive limestone karst system north-west of Townsville, Qld and six years of capture, banding and recapture monitoring of a maternity colony of the Little Bentwing-Bat (Miniopterus australis) at Riverton in southern Qld. The Riverton study represented one of the largest bat banding programmes in operation in Australia.

Both Qld projects also involved intensive remote video monitoring of breeding activity, microbat behavior and cave microhabitat usage over time, with the data entered into a comprehensive Access Database specifically developed for these projects.

Presentations

‘The Secret Hiding Places of the Southern Myotis (Myotis macropus): A Tale of Culverts and Bridges – presentation at the 2016 Australasian Bat Conference in Hobart

‘Microbats and road and rail structures in Australia: a guideline for assessment and management – co-presentation with Vanessa Goreki at the 2016 Australasian Bat Conference in Hobart

‘Positive Results from Management Measures for a Threatened Microbat Species, the Southern Myotis (Myotis macropus) in North-eastern NSW.’ – poster presentation at the 2015 Australasian Wildlife Management Society Conference (AWMS) in Perth

‘Microbats and road structures in Australia: a Guideline for Assessment and Management of Impacts’ – poster co-presentation at the 2014 Australasian Network for Ecology and Transportation (in conjunction with Ray Williams [original work], Vanessa Gorecki, Greg Ford, Rachel Lyons, Chad Browning and Craig Grabham Infrastructure)

Related Projects

Glebe Bridge Microbat Management
Woodburn Culvert Microbat Management