The document summarizes the progress of LepiMAP, a partnership that generates distribution maps of African butterflies and moths, in the first 3 months of 2014. Key points include:
- Over 4,000 records were submitted, far more than the previous year. Social media followings grew significantly.
- Projects on the Painted Lady and Cabbage White butterflies were launched. The 40,000th record was submitted.
- Species lists for Africa and South African moths were added to the database to help with identification. Outreach through blogs and slideshows helped more contribute data.
Presented by Mark van Wijk, Romain Frelat, Randall Ritzema and Sabine Douxchamps at the ILRI@40 Livestock and Environment workshop, Addis Ababa, 7 November 2014
SABAP2 (http://sabap2.adu.org.za) is the most important bird conservation research project in southern Africa. If you don't know the distributions of birds, and how they are changing, you cannot effectively do conservation intelligently. SABAP2 is monitoring the distributions of bird species across southern Africa. This slideshow demonstrates what the citizen scientists who contribute their observations to SABAP2 have achieved through the years since the project started in July 2007. It shows the coverage map every year in July, and the final slides shows the impressive additional coverage in four months between 22 July and 21 November 2013.
Examples of range-changes between SABAP1 and SABAP2Les Underhill
SABAP2 is the most important bird conservation project in South Africa. This is because conservation interventions depend on knowing the distributions of species and how they are changing. This slideshow gives some examples of changes between the first and second bird atlas projects, SABAP1 and SABAP2
SABAP2 (http://sabap2.adu.org.za) is the most important bird conservation research project in southern Africa. If you don't know the distributions of birds, and how they are changing, you cannot effectively do conservation intelligently. SABAP2 is monitoring the distributions of bird species across southern Africa. This slideshow demonstrates what the citizen scientists who contribute their observations to SABAP2 have achieved through the years since the project started in July 2007. It shows the coverage map each year in July, and the final slide shows the impressive additional coverage in the 10 months since July 2012 to May 2013. It also shows the changes in range for Black Sparrowhawk, Black-shouldered Kite and the six bulbuls since SABAP1, two decades ago.
Presented by Mark van Wijk, Romain Frelat, Randall Ritzema and Sabine Douxchamps at the ILRI@40 Livestock and Environment workshop, Addis Ababa, 7 November 2014
SABAP2 (http://sabap2.adu.org.za) is the most important bird conservation research project in southern Africa. If you don't know the distributions of birds, and how they are changing, you cannot effectively do conservation intelligently. SABAP2 is monitoring the distributions of bird species across southern Africa. This slideshow demonstrates what the citizen scientists who contribute their observations to SABAP2 have achieved through the years since the project started in July 2007. It shows the coverage map every year in July, and the final slides shows the impressive additional coverage in four months between 22 July and 21 November 2013.
Examples of range-changes between SABAP1 and SABAP2Les Underhill
SABAP2 is the most important bird conservation project in South Africa. This is because conservation interventions depend on knowing the distributions of species and how they are changing. This slideshow gives some examples of changes between the first and second bird atlas projects, SABAP1 and SABAP2
SABAP2 (http://sabap2.adu.org.za) is the most important bird conservation research project in southern Africa. If you don't know the distributions of birds, and how they are changing, you cannot effectively do conservation intelligently. SABAP2 is monitoring the distributions of bird species across southern Africa. This slideshow demonstrates what the citizen scientists who contribute their observations to SABAP2 have achieved through the years since the project started in July 2007. It shows the coverage map each year in July, and the final slide shows the impressive additional coverage in the 10 months since July 2012 to May 2013. It also shows the changes in range for Black Sparrowhawk, Black-shouldered Kite and the six bulbuls since SABAP1, two decades ago.
LinEpig: Developing a taxonomic reference using collections-management systemsNina Sandlin
Presentation to the 2015 meeting of the American Arachnological Society on migrating LinEpig, from a public photo-sharing site to a museum-orientated relational database. LinEpig provides a reference to the only North American spiders with no key to genus.
iSpot southern Africa- SANBI’s exciting new citizen science initiativeMark Simon
http://findtalentworldwide.com Check out there is a new App. that lets you broadcast your CV and Video to advertise yourself for work worldwide - Immediate exposure? You got talent we have a platform.
Addressing key scientific questions through the development of tools that use multiple data resources.
This slideshow features the various projects within the Virtual Museum of the Animal Demography Unit, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town. The Virtual Museum (VM) provides the platform for citizen scientists to contribute to biodiversity projects. Your photos can count for biodiversity conservation!
Festival of Digital Heritage Zagreb 2014Joris Pekel
My talk about Europeana at the Festival of Digital Heritage in Zagreb in April 2014. It starts with the current situation of the Europeana project, and our plans for the coming years.
Listen to this recording of by IFLA's ENSULIB standing committee, to learn how libraries are working at the forefront of citizen science; the connection between NASA climate change science, citizen science observations, and mosquito-borne disease; how the international GLOBE Mission Mosquito citizen science campaign is providing a common language and approach for meeting the global challenge to ensure good health for all from mosquito-borne diseases; and examples of resources and partnerships that public, academic, and research libraries can leverage.
How to create a species list from the Virtual Museum data -- find out how you can extract a species list for a grid cell, province or nature reserve for any of the projects in the Virtual Museum
This slideshow shows the SABAP2 coverage map year-by-year, from when the project started in 2007. This is the most important bird conservation project in the region. Trying to conserve birds without having up-to-date distribution maps is winking in the dark. The slideshow ends with "thank yous" and "pleases". Please do read these carefully.
LinEpig: Developing a taxonomic reference using collections-management systemsNina Sandlin
Presentation to the 2015 meeting of the American Arachnological Society on migrating LinEpig, from a public photo-sharing site to a museum-orientated relational database. LinEpig provides a reference to the only North American spiders with no key to genus.
iSpot southern Africa- SANBI’s exciting new citizen science initiativeMark Simon
http://findtalentworldwide.com Check out there is a new App. that lets you broadcast your CV and Video to advertise yourself for work worldwide - Immediate exposure? You got talent we have a platform.
Addressing key scientific questions through the development of tools that use multiple data resources.
This slideshow features the various projects within the Virtual Museum of the Animal Demography Unit, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town. The Virtual Museum (VM) provides the platform for citizen scientists to contribute to biodiversity projects. Your photos can count for biodiversity conservation!
Festival of Digital Heritage Zagreb 2014Joris Pekel
My talk about Europeana at the Festival of Digital Heritage in Zagreb in April 2014. It starts with the current situation of the Europeana project, and our plans for the coming years.
Listen to this recording of by IFLA's ENSULIB standing committee, to learn how libraries are working at the forefront of citizen science; the connection between NASA climate change science, citizen science observations, and mosquito-borne disease; how the international GLOBE Mission Mosquito citizen science campaign is providing a common language and approach for meeting the global challenge to ensure good health for all from mosquito-borne diseases; and examples of resources and partnerships that public, academic, and research libraries can leverage.
How to create a species list from the Virtual Museum data -- find out how you can extract a species list for a grid cell, province or nature reserve for any of the projects in the Virtual Museum
This slideshow shows the SABAP2 coverage map year-by-year, from when the project started in 2007. This is the most important bird conservation project in the region. Trying to conserve birds without having up-to-date distribution maps is winking in the dark. The slideshow ends with "thank yous" and "pleases". Please do read these carefully.
SABAP2 (http://sabap2.adu.org.za) is the most important bird conservation research project in southern Africa. If you don't know the distributions of birds, and how they are changing, you cannot effectively do conservation intelligently. SABAP2 is monitoring the distributions of bird species across southern Africa. This slideshow demonstrates what the citizen scientists who contribute their observations to SABAP2 have achieved through the years since the project started in July 2007. It shows the coverage map every alternative year in July, and the final slide shows the impressive additional coverage in just one month between 22 July and 22 August 2013. It also shows how the Bateleur has decreased and six bulbul species have increased since SABAP1, two decades ago.
SABAP2 Annual Progress and 15 May 2013 --- SteerCoLes Underhill
Version for SABAP2 SteerCo June 2012. SABAP2 (http://sabap2.adu.org.za) is the most important bird conservation research project in southern Africa. If you don't know the distributions of birds, and how they are changing, you cannot effectively do conservation intelligently. SABAP2 is monitoring the distributions of bird species across southern Africa. This slideshow demonstrates what the citizen scientists who contribute their observations to SABAP2 have achieved through the years since the project started in July 2007. It shows the coverage map each year in July, and the final slide shows the impressive additional coverage in the nine months since July 2012 to March 2013.
This slideshow shows the quarterly progress with SABAP2012. We are making the movie of bird distribution, and we are the first place in the world to monitor in both space and time
1. LepiMAP News March 2014
LepiMAP – a review of the first three months of 2014
Website: http://lepimap.adu.org.za/
LepiMAP is a partnership between the Lepidopterists’
Society of Africa and the Animal Demography Unit at the
University of Cape Town
2. LepiMAP 1
LepiMAP is generating the 21
st
century distribution maps of butterflies and
moths in Africa. These are fundamental for conservation, because if we do
not know the distributions of species, and how they are changing we cannot
do anything sensible to protect them. This newsletter reviews the progress
we have made in the first three months of 2014.
Number of records submitted to LepiMAP since the start of 2014: 4154
records! This is far more than last year when 2195 were submitted in the
first three months.
The LepiMAP Facebook group has grown from 475 members to 624!
The LepiMAP Facebook page has grown from 328 fans to 539!
The LepSoc Twitter account has grown from 41 followers to 104!!
The LepSoc Facebook page has grown to 928 fans!
The LepSoc Facebook group has grown to 844 members!
Since the start of 2014, 11 new observers have registered to contribute to
LepiMAP through the Virtual Museum website (there is a total of 281
observers). We have also added four new members to the LepiMAP ID
Panel for a total of 28 ID Panel members.
We launched the Great Little White Butterfly Migration group on
Facebook on 13 January 2014
(https://www.facebook.com/groups/WhiteButterflyMigration/). In the group
we wrote: "This is an experiment in doing some real scientific research on
Facebook." An amazing amount of data has come in through this group!
And we will be processing and analysing this data in April. Currently, the
Facebook group has 322 members.
LepiMAP mini-projects:
Project Painted Lady
The Cabbage White Land-grab
On 2 February we reached a great milestone! 40000 records submitted
to LepiMAP through the Virtual Museum website! This number does not
include bulk uploads, specimen records, historical records or records that
arrived via email in the earlier years. A really great achievement!!
If you have photographs of butterflies and moths, and have not yet
submitted them to the LepiMAP Virtual Museum, please do so as soon as
convenient. We need your records in the database so we can work out
where the priority areas for fieldwork are.
3. We have received the full African butterfly species list as well as the moth
species list for South Africa (thank you Andre and Bennie Coetzer and
Hermann Staude). These lists are in the process of being added to the
LepiMAP database. Rene Navarro is working hard on structuring the drop-
down list in a way that will make it easy for the ID panel members to
navigate.
This Flutterby Friday had a total reach of 4854
people (i.e. 4854 people saw this post)!! And
got shared 68 times via the LepiMAP Facebook
page! This record was submitted to LepiMAP by
Altha Swiegers Liebenberg.
Every Friday we feature a butterfly/moth from
the LepiMAP database. Each week we also
feature a LepiMAP “Record of the Week”, to
thank all LepiMAPpers for their contributions.
Lots of useful Slideshares were made to help LepiMAPpers contribute to
the Virtual Museum, but also to help them make use of the data in the
Virtual Museum. Here are the links to all the slideshows:
How to submit records to the Virtual Museum:
http://www.slideshare.net/meganloftieeaton/how-to-submit-records-
to-the-animal-demography-units-virtual-museums-28710898
How to photograph butterflies and moths:
http://www.slideshare.net/meganloftieeaton/how-to-photograph-
butterflies-and-moths
How to create a species map in the Virtual Museum:
http://www.slideshare.net/meganloftieeaton/how-to-create-a-map
How to create a species list from the Virtual Museum projects:
http://www.slideshare.net/meganloftieeaton/how-to-create-a-
species-list
Virtual Museum Report for 2013:
http://www.slideshare.net/meganloftieeaton/virtual-museum-report-
2013
The Animal Demography Unit is now part of Africa Geographic’s blogging
team. LepiMAP has featured twice in these blogs and here are the links:
http://blog.africageographic.com/africa-geographic-
blog/conservation/project-painted-lady/
http://blog.africageographic.com/africa-geographic-
blog/conservation/the-cabbage-white-butterfly-land-grab/
Total number of butterfly records identified in LepiMAP:
Total Number of Records: 42,567
Total Butterfly Records: 35,562
Total Butterfly Records with ID's: 34,573 (96.97%)!!
*moth ID’s to follow soon!! The moth list will be available in the near
future so that moth records can also be ID-ed.
We encourage all LepiMAPpers to join the
Lepidopterists Society of Africa (LepSoc).
LepSoc is a great society and if you have a
passion for butterflies and moths, or just want to
learn more about these beautiful insects, then
joining LepSoc is a must!! Here is a link to the
LepSoc website: http://www.lepsoc.org.za/ --- you
can find out everything you need to know about
how to join LepSoc here.
Megan Loftie-Eaton