Convened by Adrià López-Baucells and Ivana Budinski 

Introduction

The IWG emerged from the merge of ‘Bats as Indicators’ with ‘Pan-European Monitoring’ in order to initiate a Pan-European monitoring scheme, bringing together existing monitoring schemes and starting up new monitoring programmes in countries that have none.MoP6, Resolution 6.13 requests the Advisory Committee to continue to develop indicators of the activities and achievements of EUROBATS from the National Reports and their updates, or other information provided by Parties and Non-Party Range States.IWG proposed to separate the work into three smaller parallel projects:

1. Development of a prototype pan European bat population indicator based on existing data. The plan for this will be to host a workshop aimed at those running hibernacula counts to agree approaches to combining data. Contributors to the index would use the statistical package TRIM to produce national trends, and these would be combined by a central statistical team to create pan European trends. The first contributors to the index are likely to be those groups who already use TRIM, but the workshop will also include training in TRIM to make wider participation possible.
2. Build capacity for monitoring in countries which do not currently have national monitoring schemes.
3. Develop a data sharing structure for census data, with statistical tools to calculate pan-European and regional (and if participants want them, national trends), managed by Batlife Europe for ongoing data sharing, as layout out in the feasibility plan written for - 26 -EUROBATS, that was agreed by AC14.

 A four year action plan was established at the AC16:

• To update the list of countries needing capacity to establish monitoring.
• To establish capacity programmes.
• To update the list of countries/NGOs already monitoring and willing to contribute to Pan-European trends.
• To organise at least one workshop for those countries/NGOs that are currently monitoring to agree technical aspects of data combination and train in using TRIM.
• To build a data sharing and analysis database for ongoing management, sharing, and analysis of monitoring data.