The Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Unit (SEABCRU) was established in 2007 with support from BAT Biodiversity Partnership to provide an organizational framework to coordinate and implement research, capacity building, and outreach to promote the conservation of Southeast Asia’s diverse but threatened bat fauna. It is open to anyone interested in or conducting research on bats in Southeast Asia.
In 2011, the SEABCRU received five years of funding from the National Science Foundation to:
- Effect a regional assessment of the distribution, abundance and status of Southeast Asian bats through the implementation of research activities centered on four priority areas identified by consensus at a forum in 2007: flying fox distributions and population ecology; taxonomy and systematics; cave bat diversity and conservation; response of forest-dependent bats to landscape change. The SEABCRU network will develop standardized research protocols for each priority and train Southeast Asian bat researchers in the protocols through a series of workshops.
- Recruit students and researchers to the SEABCRU, engage them in the research priorities, promote effective international communication and stimulate collaboration.
This website is the portal to our online community designed to facilitate and promote communication among researchers and to collate, synthesize, and share resulting data.
The SEABCRU is coordinated by a Steering Committee (SC), and each research priority has 2-3 Team Leaders drawn from the SC, and is supported by a Student Support Team (SST).