BioSonic is a cloud-based bat acoustic analysis platform used by ecology consultancies to classify species from full-spectrum audio recordings. In late 2025, Wharton Natural Infrastructure Consultants (WNIC) ran a side-by-side test on a single survey night and measured a 66% reduction in analysis time compared to their existing workflow in Kaleidoscope Pro. Applied across their full 2025 season data volume, that ratio works out to around 327 hours of analyst time per year.
About Wharton
Wharton Natural Infrastructure Consultants is a UK-based ecological consultancy registered in Sambourne, Warwickshire. The team carries out bat surveys across England and Wales for planning applications, environmental impact assessments, and licence work.
Their projects generate large volumes of full-spectrum audio data from Wildlife Acoustics SongMeter statics, Echo Meter handhelds for transects, and Peersonic units, deployed across multiple nights and dozens of sites per season. By the end of the 2025 season, Wharton had collected 822,729 audio files totalling around 2 TB.
The old workflow
Before BioSonic, Wharton's analysts ran their recordings through Kaleidoscope Pro on the desktop. The workflow had a few steady time sinks:
- Pulling SD cards and organising files by site and survey night.
- Waiting on Kaleidoscope to chew through large batches.
- Reviewing the output manually, especially for tricky pairs like Myotis species.
- Emailing files back and forth when a second pair of eyes was needed, which made version control awkward.
- Copying numbers into report tables and Excel by hand.
By the end of a busy season, classification work had become a bottleneck rather than the science.
Switching to BioSonic
Wharton began trialling BioSonic in late November 2025. Luke Waddison, an ecologist at Wharton, signed up for the free trial after seeing the platform on LinkedIn. He then handed it to one of his colleagues to test against a real survey night that was already partway through being analysed in Kaleidoscope.
That informal test became the basis for the business case. Within four weeks Wharton had decided to use BioSonic for both their 2026 field season and the backlog of unanalysed projects from 2025. The whole team was onboarded in January 2026.
The test
One survey night. Same data. Two tools. Here is what the side-by-side comparison showed:
| Kaleidoscope Pro | BioSonic | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio files | 4,200 | 4,200 |
| Data volume | 10.3 GB | 10.3 GB |
| Time to analyse | ~2 hours 30 minutes | ~50 minutes |
That is roughly 1 hour 40 minutes saved on a single survey night. 66% less time on the same data.
Of the 4,200 files in that night, around 3,000 were noise. BioSonic filtered them out automatically, which is where most of the time saving came from.
Scaling the numbers
Wharton then took the ratio from that one night and applied it to their full 2025 season volume:
- 822,729 files collected across the 2025 season
- ~490 hours estimated to analyse the lot in Kaleidoscope
- ~163 hours estimated to do the same work in BioSonic
- ~327 hours saved per year
Applied to a typical UK ecology consultancy rate of around £65 per hour, those 327 hours equate to roughly £21,000 of labour value. This is an illustrative rate, not Wharton's internal figure.
Why the time saving is real
A third-party benchmark has shown BioSonic outperforming Kaleidoscope Pro on UK species accuracy. Fewer wrong classifications means fewer manual corrections when reviewing the AI's output. Combined with automatic noise filtering, that reduces the amount of human review time per night.
What the team does with the saved time
The 327 hours were not simply removed from the workload. Wharton plans to redirect that capacity into the parts of the job that had been squeezed by classification backlogs: more detailed ecological assessments, additional survey contracts, and stronger habitat recommendations in their reports.
Faster turnaround on classification also lets them deliver results to clients sooner, which matters during peak survey season.
In Luke's own words
“Since joining BioSonic our analysis time has reduced significantly. The team is excellent in their support, super quick to respond.”
Luke Waddison, Ecologist, Wharton (UK)
If your consultancy processes bat recordings from static detectors and transects, the test Wharton ran is easy to replicate. Upload one survey night you have already analysed and compare. You can read more about how BioSonic compares to other tools on our comparison page, or check the FAQ for common questions about upload formats, species coverage, and pricing.