North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) OneHealth (ver. 2.0, June 2025)
This dataset documents the results of large-scale surveillance efforts to assess coronavirus prevalence in North American bats. Wildlife monitoring is critical for establishing disease baselines and identifying key factors that inform conservation strategies aimed at reducing pathogen exposure among wildlife, domestic animals, and humans. Reports of SARS-CoV-2 in free-ranging wildlife in North America have raised concerns about potential exposure in bats, with potential implications for both conservation and human health. Here, we leveraged the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) to (1) assess whether bats were actively shedding coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, (2) examine whether landscape variation in coronavirus shedding was associated with resource availability, and (3) investigate temporal variation in shedding and its relationship with individual characteristics such as body mass, sex, and reproductive status. We also used the same data to develop a bat roost discovery tool using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) and evaluated the predictive ability of this model against other commonly used approaches. We found that our model could be particularly useful for predicting which bridges can be excluded from survey efforts due to low probability of bat presence or signs of bat use. In this second version of the data release for the broader NABat OneHealth project, we provide the survey data from bridge surveys which were used as inputs for our roost prediction model as well as coronavirus surveillance data from Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) which were sampled in California in 2022.
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Complete Metadata
| @type | dcat:Dataset |
|---|---|
| accessLevel | public |
| bureauCode |
[ "010:12" ] |
| contactPoint |
{ "fn": "Brian Reichert", "@type": "vcard:Contact", "hasEmail": "mailto:fortdatamanagement@usgs.gov" } |
| description | This dataset documents the results of large-scale surveillance efforts to assess coronavirus prevalence in North American bats. Wildlife monitoring is critical for establishing disease baselines and identifying key factors that inform conservation strategies aimed at reducing pathogen exposure among wildlife, domestic animals, and humans. Reports of SARS-CoV-2 in free-ranging wildlife in North America have raised concerns about potential exposure in bats, with potential implications for both conservation and human health. Here, we leveraged the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) to (1) assess whether bats were actively shedding coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, (2) examine whether landscape variation in coronavirus shedding was associated with resource availability, and (3) investigate temporal variation in shedding and its relationship with individual characteristics such as body mass, sex, and reproductive status. We also used the same data to develop a bat roost discovery tool using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) and evaluated the predictive ability of this model against other commonly used approaches. We found that our model could be particularly useful for predicting which bridges can be excluded from survey efforts due to low probability of bat presence or signs of bat use. In this second version of the data release for the broader NABat OneHealth project, we provide the survey data from bridge surveys which were used as inputs for our roost prediction model as well as coronavirus surveillance data from Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) which were sampled in California in 2022. |
| distribution |
[ { "@type": "dcat:Distribution", "title": "Digital Data", "format": "XML", "accessURL": "https://doi.org/10.5066/P14HVQHW", "mediaType": "application/http", "description": "Landing page for access to the data" }, { "@type": "dcat:Distribution", "title": "Original Metadata", "format": "XML", "mediaType": "text/xml", "description": "The metadata original format", "downloadURL": "https://data.usgs.gov/datacatalog/metadata/USGS.67e17be6d34ee7f1422164bf.xml" } ] |
| identifier | http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/USGS_67e17be6d34ee7f1422164bf |
| keyword |
[ "USGS:67e17be6d34ee7f1422164bf", "bats", "biota" ] |
| modified | 2025-07-15T00:00:00Z |
| publisher |
{ "name": "U.S. Geological Survey", "@type": "org:Organization" } |
| spatial | -124.3900, 25.9185, -93.5596, 42.0000 |
| theme |
[ "geospatial" ] |
| title | North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) OneHealth (ver. 2.0, June 2025) |
