Thursday 5 July 2012

Cards to Green Update for KZN

As of 4th July 2012 we had 38 pentads with no data, as we head steadily towards the 100% mark for KZN. This major drop has been mostly attributable to John & Kim Cox's work between Paulpietersburg & Ithala. Alan Manson has also been steadily picking off blank penatds between Pomeroy & Washbank.

It is encouraging that we are also steadily making inroads into the pentads with less than four cards. In the last three fortnights we have averaged 1.2; 1.7 and 1.6 surveys per day respectively, or 17, 24 and 22 cards per fortnight.

It is also noteworthy that we are maintaining a steady rate of submissions per day. The KZN average is 7.8 cards per day. This usually falls off somewhat in winter, but for the fortnights ending 23/05, 6/06, 20/06 and 4/07, we averaged 8.2; 5.7; 7.5 and 5.7 cards / day respectively. What is even more encouraging is that the species per card for the same period were 52.0, 52.5, 53.0 53.6. This is set against an overall KZN average of 56.2.
It would seem that winter has not really deterred neither the atlassers, nor their subjects.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

 I am pleased to announce that a map book of KZN with all of the district and local roads is now available. The book comprises 72 pages. A key of the pages is shown to the left, while an example of  page 53 [Midmar and west of PMB] is shown below. [The PDF pages are actually much clearer than this eaxmple].

The maps are based on the SGO's 1:250 000 topo-cadastral maps with road data as sourced from the KZN Dept. of Transport website overlaid. Pentads with labels are included as well as the protected areas.

The district roads and gravel "P"-class road are all labelled.

The pages are available in Adobe's PDF format, which means that all text on the overlays [D and gravel P road numbers, protected area and pentad labels] is "searchable" in Adobe Reader. Size of the files range from 733 to 2,073 KB.

While these maps cannot be used to accurately determine pentad boundaries, they are very useful for planning purposes, especially with regard to the public roads [these latter data were dated November 2010].

Email me or contact me on this blog should you require any of these maps. Thanks to Alan Manson to spurring me on to actually produce this set in PDF format and making it available here.