Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2
Latest version published by FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology on Jan 2, 2025
The Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2) is the most important bird conservation project in the region. It holds this status because all other conservation initiatives depend on the results of the bird atlas, to a greater or lesser extent. You cannot determine the conservation status of a species unless you know its range and how this is changing. So red-listing depends on the results of this project. So does the selection of sites and habitats critical to bird conservation. SABAP2 is the follow-up project to the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (for which the acronym was SABAP, and which is now referred to as SABAP1). This first bird atlas project took place from 1987-1991. The second bird atlas project started on 1 July 2007 and plans to run indefinitely. The current project is a partnership between the Animal Demography Unit at the University of Cape Town, BirdLife South Africa and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). The project aims to map the distribution and relative abundance of birds in southern Africa and the atlas area includes South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. SABAP2 was launched in Namibia in May 2012. The field work for this project is done by more than one thousand nine hundred volunteers, known as citizen scientists - they are making a huge contribution to the conservation of birds and their habitats. The unit of data collection is the pentad, five minutes of latitude by five minutes of longitude, squares with sides of roughly 9 km. There are 17339 pentads in the original atlas area of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, and a further 10600 in Namibia, 4900 in Zimbabawe and 6817 in Kenya. At the end of April 2016, the SABAP2 database contained more than 153,000 checklists. The milestone of eight million records of bird distribution in the SABAP2 database was reached on 14 April 2016, less than eight months after reaching seven million on 22 August 2015, which in turn was 10 months after the six million record milestone. It had taken two days less than a year to get from five million to six million, the fastest million records ever up to then. So doing a million in just less than eight months is awesome. More than 75% of the original SABAP2 atlas area (ie South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland) has at least one checklist at this stage in the project's development. More than 32% of pentads have four or more lists. The most pressing data collection needs are to get coverage as complete as possible, and to try to build a foundation of four checklists per pentad. On top of this foundation the skyscraper of checklists can be built. Ideally, we would like checklists representing every month of the year. We would also like to have lots of checklists for each pentad in every year. This dataset upload includes data from both the Full protocol submissions, as well as adhoc and incidental sightings that have been submitted to the project. Full Protocol submissions are done using a defined protocol, spatial and temporal. Adhoc and incidental (incid) sightings are single occurrence sightings within the same spatial resolution. The protocol type can be defined from the catalogNumber of each record.
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 20401489 records in English (607 MB) - Update frequency: weekly |
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| Metadata as an EML file | download in English (16 KB) |
| Metadata as an RTF file | download in English (13 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:
Michael Brooks, Sanjo Rose, Res Altwegg, Alan TK Lee, Henk Nel, Ulf Ottosson, Ernst Retief, Chevonne Reynolds, Peter G Ryan, Sidney Shema, Talatu Tende, Les G Underhill & Robert L Thomson (2022) The African Bird Atlas Project: a description of the project and BirdMap data-collection protocol, Ostrich, DOI: 10.2989/00306525.2022.2125097
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 906e6978-e292-4a8b-9c39-adf6bb0f3323. 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; Observation
Contacts
Who created the resource:
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Geographic Coverage
This dataset covers South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland.
| Bounding Coordinates | -37.6, -8.2 / 8.98, 42.35 (min, max Latitude / min, max Longitude) |
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Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 2007-07-01 / 2025-12-31 |
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Project Data
Africa's rich biodiversity provides critical ecosystem services. It contributes substantially to the continent’s economy and serves as a buffer to climate change. However, the continent is experiencing a dramatic loss of biodiversity even before we have been able to fully identify, document and enjoy the benefits of these natural resources. Biodiversity loss affects livelihoods and lessens resilience to extreme events, particularly for people in rural areas who are often the poorest. Integrating biodiversity into decision-making is a key strategy for mitigating these losses, and availability of relevant data is critical for informed decision-making. Focusing on birds, which are excellent indicators of general environmental health, the African Bird Atlas Project (ABAP)—a well-established citizen science project—is designed to capture bird distributional data across wide spatial scales. It is exceptional in its ability to report biodiversity changes in real time and thus provide decision-makers with current information. Country-level projects have been running successfully in southern Africa since 2007, and there has been a concerted effort to expand coverage to East and West Africa in the last 5 years. The proposed project seeks to mobilize and strengthen collaborative data management among ongoing national projects across the continent to establish an up-to-date distributional database for Africa's birds under the ABAP. The project will also develop institutional capacity of partners for managing and using this data to improve environmental management decisions, while also connecting more people to nature. Success will be measured via sustained growth of data coverage, establishment of new country-level atlases under ABAP framework and the development of user-friendly tools to summarize, visualize and analyze the data. Impact will be measured through the inclusion of this data in key conservation-management decisions throughout the continent.
| Title | African Bird Atlas Project - mapping the distribution of Africa's birds |
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| Funding | This project is part funded through GBIF and the JRS Foundation |
The personnel involved in the project:
Sampling Methods
The standard protocol is as follows: Spend at least two (2) hours recording as many different species in the pentad by visiting all (or as many different) habitats as possible. This is known as the initial intensive survey, or grid bash. These surveys will help us get fairly comprehensive bird lists for each grid cell. Record the species in the order that you see and/or hear them. This will help us gauge which are likely to be the more common species in the pentad. Keep a note of the end of each hour during your initial intensive survey. This helps us work out how much effort you put in during each survey and which birds are easier detected than others. The maximum survey period for any one pentad is five (5) days. The initial intensive survey should, where possible, take place on day 1 of the five days and you can then add any new species (in the order that you see them) to the list after the initial intensive survey up until the end of the fifth day. A new survey or checklist should only be started after each five day period for each pentad. Keep track of how much time you spend (to the nearest hour) adding any new species after your initial intensive survey.
| Study Extent | The study region is divided into pentads (5 minute x 5 minute squares) and each pentad is surveyed for a minimum of 2 hours covering all habitats representatively. The maximum survey time period is 5 days |
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| Quality Control | All records are vetted against multiple know occurance datasets, out of known range records are queried and verified before inclusion |
| Step Description 1 | The standard protocol is as follows: Spend at least two (2) hours recording as many different species in the pentad by visiting all (or as many different) habitats as possible. This is known as the initial intensive survey, or grid bash. These surveys will help us get fairly comprehensive bird lists for each grid cell. Record the species in the order that you see and/or hear them. This will help us gauge which are likely to be the more common species in the pentad. Keep a note of the end of each hour during your initial intensive survey. This helps us work out how much effort you put in during each survey and which birds are easier detected than others. The maximum survey period for any one pentad is five (5) days. The initial intensive survey should, where possible, take place on day 1 of the five days and you can then add any new species (in the order that you see them) to the list after the initial intensive survey up until the end of the fifth day. A new survey or checklist should only be started after each five day period for each pentad. Keep track of how much time you spend (to the nearest hour) adding any new species after your initial intensive survey. |
Bibliographic Citations
- Michael Brooks, Sanjo Rose, Res Altwegg, Alan TK Lee, Henk Nel, Ulf Ottosson, Ernst Retief, Chevonne Reynolds, Peter G Ryan, Sidney Shema, Talatu Tende, Les G Underhill & Robert L Thomson (2022) The African Bird Atlas Project: a description of the project and BirdMap data-collection protocol, Ostrich, DOI: 10.2989/00306525.2022.2125097 DOI: 10.2989/00306525.2022.2125097
Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 906e6978-e292-4a8b-9c39-adf6bb0f3323 |
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| http://aduipt.uct.ac.za:8080/ipt-2.3.2/resource?r=sabap2 |