A new method employing species-specific thresholding identifies acoustically overlapping bats.
Acoustic monitoring to collect free-flying acoustic data was conducted at a 137 sites. Within each site, echolocation calls were recorded in zero-crossing analysis format using one Anabat Express acoustic recorder (Titley Scientific, Brisbane, Australia). We performed double blind manual checking on eight randomly selected sites using Anabat Insight v1.9.7 (Titley Scientific, 2019), by visual inspection and measurement of discriminating call characteristics in zero-crossing. Site replication was used to minimize false negatives, each site being surveyed for six consecutive nights. The presence of a bat was defined as a sequence of a minimum of ten recognisable echolocation calls per species. The data set includes the raw data and the manually identified data which was used to apply species- specific thresholding as outlined in the manuscript.