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Coordinated Waterbird Counts

Latest version published by FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology on Apr 19, 2025 FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology

The Animal Demography Unit (ADU) launched the Coordinated Waterbird Counts (CWAC) project in 1992 as part South Africas commitment to International waterbird conservation. This is being done by means of a programme of regular mid-summer and mid-winter censuses at a large number of South African wetlands. Regular six-monthly counts are regarded as a minimum standard; however, we do encourage counters to survey their wetlands on a more regular basis as this provides more accurate data. All the counts are conducted by volunteers; people and organisations with a passion for waterbird conservation. It is one of the largest and most successful citizen science programmes in Africa, providing much needed data for waterbird conservation around the world. Currently the project regularly monitors over 400 wetlands around the country, and furthermore curates waterbird data for over 600 sites.

Downloads

Download the latest version of the resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file download 384522 records in English (10 MB) - Update frequency: daily
Metadata as an EML file download in English (7 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file download in English (6 KB)

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Brooks M (2015): Coordinated Waterbird Counts. v1.146. FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. Dataset/Occurrence. http://aduipt.uct.ac.za:8080/ipt-2.3.2/resource?r=cwac&v=1.146

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 2fd17f41-80ef-4c15-ac48-63ca89f4bb16.  FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by South African Biodiversity Information Facility.

Keywords

Occurrence; Waterbirds; Counts; South Africa; Observation

Contacts

Who created the resource:

Michael Brooks
Information Systems Specialist
Animal Demography Unit University of Cape Town 7701 Cape Town Western Cape ZA +27 21 650 4751
http://cwac.adu.org.za

Who can answer questions about the resource:

Michael Brooks
Information Systems Specialist
Animal Demography Unit University of Cape Town 7701 Cape Town Western Cape ZA +27 21 650 4751
http://cwac.adu.org.za

Who filled in the metadata:

Michael Brooks
Information Systems Specialist
Animal Demography Unit University of Cape Town 7701 Cape Town Western Cape ZA +27 21 650 4751
http://www.adu.org.za

Who else was associated with the resource:

Point Of Contact
Michael Brooks
Information Systems Specialist
FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, Dept of Biological Sciences University of Cape Town 7701 Rondebosch, Cape Town Western Cape ZA +27216504751
http://cwac.birdmap.africa

Geographic Coverage

The Coordinated Waterbird Count project is active in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. There are plans to extren this coverage to numerous other countries.

Bounding Coordinates -36.2, -21.1 / 11.45, 37.77 (min, max Latitude / min, max Longitude)

Temporal Coverage

Start Date 1993-01-01

Additional Metadata

Alternative Identifiers 2fd17f41-80ef-4c15-ac48-63ca89f4bb16
http://aduipt.uct.ac.za:8080/ipt-2.3.2/resource?r=cwac