We are currently working with Friends of the High Line and their high school interns to study how bats use the park's different habitats.

The first study of it's kind, this research will eventually enable us to map bat hot spots on the High Line and understand how the city's 3D structure influences bat movement. 

We began working with the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative at Naval Cemetery Landscape in 2025. Because this park is small and isolated in an otherwise industrial stretch of Williamsburg, we did not expect to find much bat activity. Our bat surveys proved us wrong. Over three weeks, we collected hundreds of eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis) recordings, like the one on the left, that revealed the gardens at Naval Cemetery Landscape are a valuable foraging ground for hungry migrating bats.

We have been working with Green-Wood Cemetery since 2024 and were honored to be one of their 2025 Environmental Research Fellows. 

In a 2024 comparison of bat activity between Green-Wood Cemetery and the Quaker Cemetery in Prospect Park, we learned something unique about Green-Wood: its bat activity was dominated by big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus). In fact, Green-Wood hosted, on average, about 5x more big brown activity than its neighboring park. This is unusual for New York City as the eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis) is typically dominant in our local parks. 

Our 2025 research produced this big brown bat hot spot map of Green-Wood (left, warmer colors=higher activity). As you can see, we learned that big brown bats were especially fond of the cemetery's ponds (the four red spots) and its less-forested perimeter. Big browns are fast flyers, but they are not very nimble. This map suggests they may be fond of Green-Wood because it is easier for them to move around in than more densely forested parks like Prospect Park.