These online materials were developed for the university course "Behavioural Methods in Conservation" at the University of Greifswald (Germany), where students learn in details about how to collect automated biodiversity monitoring data and how to efficiently analyze the resulting "big-data". To complete the course, please follow the step-by-step intructions provided below. 

In this course, we specifically focus on automated monitoring of European bats with infrared light barriers and camera traps (for more details see "Introduction"). Using the here provided species identification guide, users can learn how to distinguish different bat species from camera trap images. They can test their knowledge in a short quiz that contains 50 camera trap images. Once they are confident with the species identification process, they can complete a species identification challenge that contains 3x100 camera trap images from a real-world dataset. Their accuracy will be calculated based on groundtruth identifications provided by experts. 

Finally, using a full autumn-season camera trap dataset, users can explore the use of artificial intelligence to automatically process large camera trap image datasets. They can compare the manual and the automated identification results in terms of species diversity, relative abundance of species, and species-specific phenology that can be obtained from camera trap datasets.