The inspiration for BatWalk came from the Indicator Bats Program – more commonly known as iBats (http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/ibatsprogram.html) - an international programme for monitoring foraging bats based on a strict protocol which mandates a certain type of time expansion bat detector used from a car moving at 15 mph. The strict protocol is necessary to create data that can be used scientifically to generate comparable abundance indices between times and places.
BatWalk is a program that applies the same principles to recordings of bats using other equipment and on transects other than those made in cars. You can use, for example, a cheap frequency division bat detector (e.g. a BatBox Batton) liked to a smart phone to record bats encountered whilst out walking. At the same time, the smart phone can be used to record the route walked (with its built-in GPS). You end up with two files – a WAV file and a GPX file.
You will need some software to analyse the sound file using software (e.g. the free Wave Surfer program - https://sourceforge.net/projects/wavesurfer/) that lets you play back the sound and analyse the sonograms (also called spectrograms) to identify the bats. Using the sound analysis software, you can read the time at which a bat was recorded.
BatWalk enbables you to match these times to a location recorded in the GPX file. The output from the BatWalk program is a CSV file of valid spatially-referenced biological records from your bat recordings.
BatWalk is a VB.NET program that was first created as a freely available Windows program in 2012. It became an open source project in 2017.