North American Bat Monitoring Program Knitted Grid and Multi-scale Grid Covariates

USGS staff with the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) have released knitted grid and multi-scale grid covariates. This data release contains spatial and tabular products that provide a multi-scale, continuous NABat master sample grid surface and a suite of ecologically-relevant covariates. This continuous surface, called the "knitted grid," is a combination of 5 kilometer (km), 10km, and 50km master sample grids for the Contiguous United States (CONUS), Alaska, and Canada. The NABat master sample is comprised of a series of 10 x 10km grid cell frameworks spanning North American. The cells within the master sample are prioritized for sampling using a generalized random-tessellation stratified (GRTS) survey design that uses a spatially balanced approach to assign ordering. In addition to the knitted grid, a suite of covariates relevant to bat ecology were selected and summarized at each knitted grid cell, for each spatial scale. Ecologically-relevant covariates include ecoregion type, number of buildings, distance to mines, average temperature, average precipitation, average and maximum elevation, number and length of culverts, mean physiographic diversity index, presence of waterbody and/or stream/river, number of tree species, presence of karsts, proportion of land cover types, megawatt capacity and rotor swept area of wind turbines.

To view the data release, click here.

Davis, H.T., Udell, B.J., Gaulke, S.M., Inman, R.D., Tousley, F.C., Straw, B.R., and Reichert, B.E., 2025, North American Bat Monitoring Program Knitted Grid and Multi-scale Grid Covariates: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P13SHEPP.