Coordinated Waterbird Counts
Latest version published by FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology on May 19, 2025
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.
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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 384996 records in English (10 MB) - Update frequency: daily |
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| 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. v1.147. FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. Dataset/Occurrence. http://aduipt.uct.ac.za:8080/ipt-2.3.2/resource?r=cwac&v=1.147
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
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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) |
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Temporal Coverage
| Start Date | 1993-01-01 |
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Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 2fd17f41-80ef-4c15-ac48-63ca89f4bb16 |
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| http://aduipt.uct.ac.za:8080/ipt-2.3.2/resource?r=cwac |