CASTLETON - Wildlife biologists from a Maine environmental firm will share two year's worth of research on Vermont's bat populace to help shed light on "white-nose syndrome," the disease that has killed at least 400,000 bats in the Northeast.

Stantec of Topsham, Maine, has installed five of its acoustic bat detectors on Grandpa's Knob in Castleton. The devices detect and log bats that pass by each unit, according to company spokeswoman Alison Smith.

"Stantec's participation in this research effort will provide some of the most valuable data to monitor the effects of white-nose syndrome on bat populations in Vermont," Scott Darling, a wildlife biologist with Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department said recently. "This critical research could not have been conducted without their assistance."

Stantec, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources consider the pre-disease data as an excellent foundation for continuing research into what acoustic bat surveys may reveal about the effects of the disease on bat populations, Stantec officials said.

White-nose syndrome was first detected in 2006 in eastern New York and has since spread throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The disease gets its name from the appearance of a white fungus on the noses and wings of affected bats. Researchers still don't know what causes the fungus or why the disease has spread and killed so many bats so quickly.

State officials in Tennessee recently closed all caves on the state land for a year to help prevent the spread of white-nose syndrome to bats there, according to the National Speliological Society Web page. In Rockaway Township, N.J., more than 90 percent of 30,000 bats in the Hibernia Mine have died, the Daily Journal (Parsippany, N.J.) reported recently.

The information provided by Stantec detectors on the Vermont bat population this summer will be compared with similar information Stantec began collecting in 2007, before white-nose syndrome had been detected in the state, company officials said.

The team will collect data through August and hope to publish preliminary findings by the end of the year.

"When the agencies asked us if we'd be interested in partnering with them in this effort, we unequivocally said yes and volunteered the continued use of our equipment," said Gino Giumarro, a wildlife biologist with Stantec and leader of the research effort.

The detectors were initially in place as part of an exploratory effort by a company interested in installing wind towers along ridgelines in that area, a project now on hold.

Stantec staff are monitoring those units every two weeks and downloading the data for analysis, Smith said. Stantec conducted two full seasons of bat surveys for the proposed wind farm project, amassing the largest bat acoustic data set collected to-date in Vermont, the company said. That wind tower work is finished.

"The spread of wind power development has contributed to the overall knowledge that we have of bats' natural history, so we should be able to apply those same unbiased scientific survey techniques and data to help better understand white-nose syndrome," Giumarro said.

This summer's project is being funded by Northeast Region 5 of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that is leading the effort on managing white-nose syndrome research.

Stantec, a publically traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, is donating the use of its equipment - which normally costs thousands of dollars in rental fees - while USFWS has offered to help defray labor costs of their field staff maintaining equipment and time doing data analysis, Smith said. The amount of the funding is still being worked out, she said.

The detectors are recording the calls that each bat sends out to locate insects in the air and use the information to identify individual bats, Vermont biologist Ryan Smith said this week.

"We are speculating we are going to see a significant decline in bat (numbers) from last summer and summer before," Smith said. The state expects to records calls from all six species of cave bats found in Vermont, he said. The native cave bats forage for insects in this area as part of their summer range.

The goal will be to verify impacts to the six species, all of which have been affected by white nose syndrome, Smith said. These include the little brown bat, the most common, the Indiana bat, federally endangered, and the small footed bat, a state endangered bat that frequents rocky outcrops.

They will also record migratory bats that come to Vermont, using the ridgelines like those around Grandpa's Nob as corridors of travel in summer and fall. They tend to fly at night and roost in the daytime, usually in the foliage of trees, Smith said.