The company said monitoring the bat boxes at the site helped confirm the conservation measures were working and could highlight “unexpected and valuable” results, like the Nathusius’ pipistrelle.
It said using eDNA swabs was a “potentially useful monitoring tool” for ecologists as data could be easily missed in ‘one-off’ surveys like a visual bat box check.
These techniques could more widely increase knowledge of species’ distributions, helping effective conservation to be targeted in the right place, it said.
Working alongside South Yorkshire Bat Group and Yorkshire Water, biodiversity intelligence company NatureMetrics analysed eDNA collected from bat boxes and detected Nathusius’ pipistrelle – one of the UK’s rarer rarest breeding bat species, which is known to migrate long distances between the UK and Europe.
The finding was later confirmed in follow-up surveys, marking the first confirmed roost of the species in South Yorkshire.
According to the Bat Conservation Trust, the species is similar in appearance to, but slightly larger than, the common bat but with longer fur on its back.
Product ecologist at Nature Metrics, Dr George Muscatt, said the eDNA was “tiny traces or fingerprints of DNA that species in that ecosystem have left behind”.
He said previously the team would have to climb the trees at night to “try to visually identify a species occupying a bat roost”, which was time consuming.
“By taking a surface swab approach, we’ve been able to monitor a far larger number of bat boxes in a very short space of time,” he said.
