...author's summary...

.."Bats are able to classify plants using echolocation. They emit ultrasonic signals and can recognize the plant according to the echo returning from it. This ability assists them in many of their daily activities, like finding food sources associated with certain plants or using landmarks for navigation or homing. The echoes created by plants are highly complex signals, combining together all the reflections from the many leaves that a plant contains. Classifying plants or other complex objects is therefore considered a troublesome task and we are far from understanding how bats do it. In this work, we suggest a simple algorithm for classifying plants according to their echoes. Our algorithm is able to classify with high accuracy plant echoes created by a sonar head that simulates a typical frequency-modulated bat's emitting receiving parameters. Our results suggest that plant classification might be easier than formerly considered. It gives us some hints as to which features might be most suitable for the bats, and it opens possibilities for future behavioral experiments to compare its performance with that of the bats."...more there, full open access article

ed: seriously cool stuff. Imagine a mashup of being able to aim a sonar like device at woods or field and get back a list of all the different species and where they were, and combine that with GPS, then do an overlay with satellite imagery, optical and radar. You would have an exact detailed "land fingerprint"- a supermap- that covered all the bases.