Project Overview: Assess the unprecedented threat of invasive disease and habitat loss affecting Yosemite’s bats by monitoring local bat populations and engaging with park visitors.

How your support helps: Biodiversity in Yosemite National Park is intimately linked to cliff-dwelling creatures that visitors hardly see: bats. These species protect the health of park ecosystems by consuming insects, cycling nutrients, and acting as a food source for other iconic and protected park species. As a result, the unprecedented impacts of habitat loss and invasive disease that threaten Yosemite’s 17 species of bats have park-wide implications.  

In Yosemite, local bat populations are threatened by white-nose syndrome, a disease that causes near-certain mortality among bat colonies. First discovered in North America in 2006, the disease eradicated 11 million bats in the first five years and is now found throughout California. To address bat mortality from disease and habitat loss, Yosemite’s Big Wall Bats Team has developed novel methods and conducted critical research over the past two years to uncover where park colonies of bats roost, sleep, raise their young, and hibernate.  

This data, funded by Yosemite Conservancy, assists park managers in understanding how bat ecology and human interactions are tied to the spread and severity of diseases — including white-nose syndrome — and the impacts of landscape challenges within and beyond park boundaries.   

With your support, this study lays the groundwork for long-term conservation efforts by assisting visitors in celebrating and protecting Yosemite’s biodiversity, collecting data to bolster international knowledge of bat ecology, and monitoring the effects of white-nose syndrome on local bat populations. 

This year: In 2026, the Big Wall Bats team will deliver lasting, measurable conservation impacts for Yosemite’s bats and cliff ecosystems. Initiatives will include identifying and protecting critical bat habitat, identifying the environmentalfeatures and habitats that bats prefer, expanding species monitoring capacity with the deployment of ultrasonic acoustic detectors, and swabbing white-nose-syndrome-vulnerable species to detect and track the disease’s presence, should it spread into Yosemite.

Project Partners: Yosemite National Park; United States Geological Survey; Bat Conservation International


Photo credit: Sean Smith