White Nose Syndrome will be a dominant topic of research presented at the annual North American Symposium on Bat Research next week in Toronto, Ontario, October 25-29.
NASBR is the single largest meeting of bat researchers in North America. It is dominated by the academic community, and features many student PhD and Masters level papers, as well as lont-time professional researchers in both the academic and wildlife management worlds.
In recent years, WNS has grown to dominate a normally broader agenda of all sorts of bat research. While that broader research continues to be a large part of the conference, in a number of states both wind development and WNS are presenting threats to bats - a double whammy, if you will - and response strategies are often intermingled, important information to know in order to have a more thorough understanding of the environmental, advocacy, and political context in which WNS is taking place.
Abstracts and the program for this year's NASBR conference have just been posted on line:
http://www.nasbr.org/meetings/41_toronto/
Some topics have been presented at other events, but most are new. Those presented at other events are often earlier versions, with more recent research data provided now, and more evolved conclusions. Reading through the abstracts, it's possible to discern emerging research trends. Many of the papers and posters presented work their way into publication in the following year, after appropriate peer review.
For anyone interested in what we are likely to be hearing about in the coming months and years on WNS, I highly recommend perusing these abstracts.