ARCATA -- Humboldt State University biology professor Dr. Joseph M. Szewczak has won a three-year, $673,000 federal grant to analyze bat echo-location.

Of the total, $230,000 will go directly to HSU in salary and overhead expenses.

Szewczak and collaborator Lars Pettersson of Sweden will develop a self-contained acoustic monitoring system that can continuously record high resolution bat vocalizations. The money comes from a Pentagon initiative named the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. Szewczak will investigate ways to reduce the costs of monitoring threatened and endangered species on federal lands.

"I see this as a win-win situation, because this project can help reduce costs for federal agencies, but the technology that we are developing will also have broad application for addressing many ecological/species questions in new and more thorough ways," Szewczak said. Amphibians, insects and birds might also be monitored.

With other experts from New Zealand, Sweden and Reno, Nev., Szewczak created a computing system to monitor the identifying vocal patterns of different species of bats. The new system will record bats in the field for weeks or months at a time, while filtering out all undesired signals. The recordings will be digitized and stored.

With the help of Dr. Stuart Parsons from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Szewczak is also developing an automated species identification software that would simulate decision-making capabilities. The identification algorithms will be based on previously confirmed recordings of bat species.

Due to the many bat species that have not yet been recorded, Szewczak plans to do considerable field work across the United States to acquire the foundation data needed to generate the species identification algorithms.

The effort will require contributions from many people, a fair amount of equipment, and travel and support for field crews. That comes to a projected expenditure of more than $200,000 per year through 2008.

Szewczak has worked with bats since 1984, when he studied the physiology of torpor in the big brown bat for his Ph.D. thesis at Brown University. He teaches multiple bat-related courses at the University of California and San Francisco State University, as well as at HSU.