Monday 11 November 2024, at 12 CET Professor Fiona Mathews will have a talk about bat movement in the first webinar organized under the framework of the Horizon Europe project OneBAT.

Briefly, the project OneBAT aims at investigating different crucial steps that might favor/hamper the spillover of viruses. The project aims at an holistic approach by combining institutions – including the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie (IZSVe) – with different expertise, from bat ecologists to pure virologists.

The project focuses on a single bat, Miniopterus schreibersii¸ for which we will try to harmonize monitoring (including tagging and tracking), surveillance and develop new specific methods for diagnostic and virology (serological and molecular approaches specific for their associated viruses, cell lines and so on). Of note, M. schreibersii hosts at least two divergent lyssaviruses raising public health concern for the absence of appropriate preventive and control biologics. Nevertheless, most protocols and approaches developed and applied by the project can easily been adapted to other bat species of interest.

From the OneBAT project website:

“Presented by Professor Fiona Mathews, (University of Sussex), the webinar will explore recent advancements in tracking bat populations across Europe, with a focus on the methods and technologies being used to monitor their movements. Professor Fiona Mathews will discuss the challenges in gathering large-scale data on bat distribution, particularly due to the limitations of current tracking tools like GPS for small species. The OneBAT project aims to overcome these challenges by combining diverse datasets and piloting new techniques such as automated telemetry and large-scale tagging. This research is essential for understanding bat ecology and assessing future risks related to climate change, habitat alteration, and virus emergence.”

The webinar is free and open to everyone. It will be recorded and posted both on the OneBAT website and on the OneBAT YouTube channel, and then promoted on X and Linkedin. You can register for the webinar and find more information on the OneBAT website. For any need, you can contact the webinar organizers by writing to: andrea.spotti@warranthub.it

Register to the webinar »