ADU 20th Anniversary Celebrations in KZN

The KZN celebration  of the ADU's 20th Anniversary will be held at the Pietermaritzburg Botanic Gardens on Saturday 11 February 2012. The programme is as follows:

ADU T-shirts will be on sale at the venue, or from the ADU's online shop

09:30 Tea and coffee

10:00 Welcome - Doug Harebottle

10:05 Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2 (SABAP2) - Colin Summersgill

10:25 Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment (SABCA) - Steve Woodhall

10:45 Birds In Reserves Project (BIRP) - Peter Greaves

11:05 Tea 

11:30 Southern African Bird Ringing Unit (SAFRING) - Dieter Oschadleus/Mark Brown

11:50 Coordinated Waterbird Counts (CWAC) - Doug Harebottle

12:10 Southern African Reptile Conservation Assessment (SARCA) - Johan Marais

12:30 The Virtual Museums - Dieter Oschadleus

12.50 Coordinated Avifaunal Roadcounts (CAR) - Doug Harebottle

13:10 Picnic lunch

14:00 Feedback session

15:00 Wrap-up

For further information and to register look at: http://20.adu.org.za/index.php

Cards to Green for KZN

It has been quite a while since I have added anything to this blog, so the change in the map alongside is quite marked.

While we have been slowly chipping away along the N3 axis, Zululand has been moving along in leaps and bounds. This has been mostly thanks to the concerted and well planned efforts by John and Kim Cox.
Perhaps the biggest news since the last post has been the return of cards in QDS 2731DD, which has for a long time been empty. Trish Strachan, Richard Johnstone,  John and Kim Cox mounted a mini-expidition in early December 2012 and completed a number of empty pentads as well as completing second cards. So thanks to these four this QDS now has been quite well atlased.
As things stand at 20/01/2012, we have only 74 pentads of our 1296 for which we have no data. It would be really great if we could finish these pentads before the end of June 2012, or five fulls years of SABAP2.
Thanks to all have, and still are contributing to the project.

Summer Chameleon Challenge

After a lengthy break from individual challenges, we have one for this summer. This challenge will contribute greatly towards the Cards-to-Green project as the points system is biased towards atlasing the more poorly covered pentads. I have taken the liberty of copying Doug Harebottles email below:

"Finally, we'd like to announce our summer mini-project - The Summer Chameleon, an individual challenge with the aim of allocating points to atlasers for making pentads change colour! We did this a few years back and, backed by popular demand, we have decided to do this again. The focus here is to go wide - more points are given for un-atlased pentads or pentads with few checklists and there are even bonus points awarded depending on what number checklist it is. The summer chameleon runs from the 19 November (so already some of you have points on the board) through to 15 February. There is a leaderboard on the homepage http://sabap2.adu.org.za) so you can track how you are doing and how others are doing.

This is how the point system will work:
15 points for making a pentad yellow (1st list),
12 points for making a pentad orange (2nd list),
10 for light green (4th list),
9 for dark green (7th list),
8 for light blue (11th list),
7 for dark blue (16th list),
6 for red (25th),
5 for purple (50th),
4 for pink (100th),

PLUS
5 points for every checklist for pentads with fewer than 7 checklists,
4 points for every checklist in a pentad with fewer than 16 checklists,
2 points for a checklist between 16 and 25 lists
1 point for each checklist in a pentad with more than 25 lists

... and we offer a bonus of 5 points for lists from pentads in Lesotho and the Northern Cape, provided they are lists 1 to 7.

KZN Atlas Report 3-Aug-11 to 17-Aug-11

The big news is that we are at 88.7% coverage, with 90% now within imminent reach.
What is even more encouraging is that we are also steadily increasing our two and seven card coverage as well, having moved from 57.2% to 57.6% and 21.1% to 21.3% respectively.
These may not sound very high, but they represent 5 and 3 pentads, which if you do the multiplication, means 10 and 15 submissions. I know that this does not necessarily mean that there were 25 submissions for these 8 pentads, but the assumption is that there could have been 25 cards submitted. In fact in the last two weeks we had 87 cards submitted. So in effect we are not only breaking new ground and increasing depth of coverage, but also targeting that depth fairly well.
In the last two weeks we have had 18 submissions which have contributed to the 'Cards-to-Green' effort. This has moved us from needing 2 361 cards, to 2 343. The only movement has been in the 3 and 4 cards needed categories, i.e. pentads that had no or only 1 card.
Looking at total submissions, we averaging 8.1 cards submitted per day. For the last two weeks we had a submission rate of 7.7 cards and 4.7 cards per day for the respective weeks. It would seem that the cold weather in the last week has really affected submissions. With the onset of spring we also experiencing higher species totals, with 56.1 and 50.3 spp/card in the last two weeks against 45.6 and 52.0 spp/card in the previous fortnight.

KZN Atlas Report 8-Jun-11 to 3-Aug-11

During these 56 days we have had 10 new pentads added to the KZN total. Leading the charge were John and Kim Cox who completed four of these, followed by Alan Manson who did three, and then Duncan McKenzie, Colin Gerrans and myself who did one each.

Moving to the 'Cards to Green' effort,I have not been keeping absolute track of who has been doing what, but the biggest movement has also been in the north east, and glancing through the lists, John & Kim Cox's names have been appearing very regularly.

At 8-Jun, KZN was short of 2 442 surveys to turn the entire province green on the coverage map. At 3-Aug we needed 56 cards less. Besides the 10 cards in new pentads, we also had 18 fewer pentads needing 3 cards. This is quite an achievement, because it means that we submitted 28 cards for pentads needing three cards. We now have 18 less, plus the ten that had no cover, i.e. for every pentad with no data that we submit a card for, we increase the number of pentads for which we need three cards.

For this reason we now have 8 more pentads which need two cards to turn green. We can pat ourselves on the back however, since we actually reduced the number of pentads that only need one card by three.

On average we have been submitting 1.4 cards per day that contribute towards the 'KZN Cards to Green' mini-project.

Just to put a geographic perspective for  which degree squares these 81 cards to green have been submitted [the Degree Square followed by cards]:

2832 14
2831 12
2930 12
2730  8
2931  8
2632  7 [Only counting those in KZN]
2929  6 [Only counting those in KZN]
2830  5
2732  4
2731  2 [Only counting those in KZN]
2829  2 [Only counting those in KZN]
3029  1 [Only counting those in KZN]

If one looks at the accompanying map, you can see the development of a contigously atlased block stretching north from Mtunzini north along the N2. This could quite easily rival the block along the N3 stretching north-west from the coast.

Thanks to all who have are participating in the project, lets keep up the good work.

Cards to Green for KZN

This is the 'Cards to Green' map for KZN as at 22/06/2011.

We are slowly closing out the red pentads [those with no cards].

In fact, since 11/05/11 we have had 42 cards submitted that have improved this map, with 12 cards in new pentads and 12 second cards. This has meant that we now have 234 pentads that need 2 cards against 224 on 11/05. We have however reduced the number of pentads that need one card from 111 to 109, but considering that as the number of pentads that need 3 or four cards is reduced, this figure usually rises, we are doing pretty well.

An interesting stat is that over these 42 days we have averaged 1.6 cards per day for pentads with less than four cards.

Cards to Green for KZN

This is the 'Cards to Green' map as at 11/05/2011.

We are progressing quite well, with an ever diminishing number of red pentads [those with no surveys].

The greatest recent effort has been Tim Wood, Don Leitch & Gavin Calverley's expedition based at Babanago, from where they surveyed 19 pentads, 15 of which were in blank pentads.
Atlasers who have also been chipping away at the red squares are:
Alan Manson who has done 5 new pentads since March, 4 in the Tugela Valley and one west of Bergville;
John & Kim Cox with 3 east of Imfolozi Park;
Iain Guthrie, Duncan McKenzie, Mike Cunningham and Peter Spence with one survey in various corners of the province.

Thanks also to the many atlasers who have been steadily chipping away to turn this map less colourful - our ultimate goal would be to turn this whole map blank. We have 168 pentads with no cards left in KZN, and to reach 4 cards for every pentad, we need another 2 486 cards.