Animal Demography Unit Department of Biological Sciences University of Cape Town Introduction This report highlights the activities of the Animal Demography Unit (ADU http://adu.org.za) in the first half of 2015, to mid-June. It was presented to a meeting of the ADU Advisory Board on 17 June. This particular report focuses on the project component of the ADU, and does not deal with postgraduate students or research publications. The ADU is a research unit of the University of Cape Town. It visualizes itself as a boundary organization located within the university environment. The ADU’s focus is on linking academic science with conservation policy and action. It is located within the academic “ivory tower” but much of the strategic thinking and activity lies outside of it. Since 1991, the ADU has been collecting, analyzing and disseminating information on Africa’s biodiversity. This is achieved through collaborative participation in citizen science projects, long-term monitoring, and statistical ecology. The overall ADU strategy is captured in Box 1. Citizen Science in 2015 Citizen Scientist Days In January to June 2015, Citizen Scientist Days were held in Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, Vereeniging, Polokwane, Nelspruit, Pietermaritzurg, Durban, at UCT for a Box 1. The ADU strategy is to push data up the slope of influence. Large databases have no influence unless they are summarized into information. The implications of that information in turn need to transformed into text and other media which unpack the conservation significance. This then needs to move into policy space, education space, and other spheres where it makes a difference to the way biodiversity is managed and valued.
Transcript
Animal Demography Unit
Department of Biological Sciences
University of Cape Town
Introduction This report highlights the activities of the Animal Demography Unit (ADU http://adu.org.za) in the first half of 2015, to mid-June. It was presented to a meeting of the ADU Advisory Board on 17 June. This particular report focuses on the project component of the ADU, and does not deal with postgraduate students or research publications. The ADU is a research unit of the University of Cape Town. It visualizes itself as a boundary organization located within the university environment. The ADU’s focus is on linking academic science with conservation policy and action. It is located within the academic “ivory tower” but much of the strategic thinking and activity lies outside of it. Since 1991, the ADU has been collecting, analyzing and disseminating information on Africa’s biodiversity. This is achieved through collaborative participation in citizen science projects, long-term monitoring, and statistical ecology. The overall ADU strategy is captured in Box 1.
Citizen Science in 2015 Citizen Scientist Days In January to June 2015, Citizen Scientist Days were held in Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, Vereeniging, Polokwane, Nelspruit, Pietermaritzurg, Durban, at UCT for a
Box 1. The ADU strategy is to push data up the slope of influence. Large databases have no influence unless they are summarized into information. The implications of that information in turn need to transformed into text and other media which unpack the conservation significance. This then needs to move into policy space, education space, and other spheres where it makes a difference to the way biodiversity is managed and valued.
group of Stellenbosch University postgraduate students, and in Kirstenhof, Cape Town. There is one more event scheduled for the first half of the year, at Vredendal on 27 June (Figures 1 to 10). Citizen Science Weeks Two of the three Citizen Science Weeks planned for 2015 have been held. The Summer Storm took place from Saturday 31 January to Sunday 8 February, and the Autumn Attack from 25 April to 3 May, a nine-day period with only three work days. The Heritage Hunt will take place from 19 to 27 September, and includes the Heritage Day public holiday. The focus of these events is on the collection of records for the bird atlas and the virtual museum (Table 1).
Data volumes In mid-June 2015, the total number of georeferenced records in the ADU database was 21.1 million, all destined for the GBIF database (Table 2). The GBIF database contains 543 million records (see www.gbif.org). The ADU database represents 3.9% of this total; however one considers it, it is a remarkable concept that nearly 4% of the global open access biodiversity database comes from a single small group, based within an academic institution. The only entire countries with larger volumes of data in the GBIF database are Australia, Sweden, UK and USA (GBIF Annual Report 2013). The fact that the 21 million biodiversity distribution records are open-access means that they are therfore available for research and conservation. During the first half of 2015 (up to 13 June), 583953 records of bird distribution (516467 full-protocol and 67486 ad hoc and incidental records) have been submitted to the bird atlas project, SABAP2, and 33481 to the ADU Virtual Museum (Table 3). Extrapolated to the full year, this represents an 8% increase in bird atlas records, and a 30% increase in virtual museum records over the totals for 2014. On 10 June, nearly eight years from the start of SABAP2, the total number of records exceeded the SABAP1 database in size. Although most of the SABAP1 data was collected over the five-year period 1987–91, data collection continued to 1993 in some regions, and the project incorporated earlier data from regional projects in the “southwestern Cape”, “Orange Free State”, “Transvaal”, “eastern Cape” and Namibia, with all data subsequent to 1980 included in the SABAP1 database. The SAFRING bird ringing totals show a downwards trend. This is largely due to decreases in the numbers of seabirds ringed by Marine & Coastal Management, and the ending of subsidized ringing of Red-billed Queleas.
Conferences, events and developments Africa Rising Ashwell Glasson, Les Underhill, Michael Brooks and Rene Navarro attended the Africa Rising conference at SANBI in May. The three-day event had a focus on
biodiversity informatics, especially in Africa as a whole. We were the only South African academic institution present in our own right. The chief value to us was a series of networks created with delegates from GBIF, WCMC, SANBI and many African countries. IPT server At a meeting at SANBI on 12 June, it was agreed that the ADU would be able to serve its 21 million records of biodiversity informatics into the GBIF network through an IPT server linked to the other ADU servers. This would enable live data to be served continuously. In other words, if someone does a search within GBIF for, say, African Black Oystercatcher, one of the many servers around the world from which relevant records would be extracted would be the IPT server in the ADU, and would include bird atlas data submitted that day. Citizen Science 2015 Sally Hofmeyr attended Citizen Science 2015, the inaugural conference of the Citizen Science Association, and also the annual meeting of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), in San Jose, California, 11–16 February. At Citizen Science 2015 she presented the ADU's citizen science endeavours in Africa, explaining strategies to motivate citizen scientists. She also heard about a wide range of other citizen science projects in the US and other parts of the world. At the AAAS 2015 meeting she presented a poster, informing people about what the ADU does. National Museums of Kenya Michael Brooks spent a week in Kenya from 7–15 May. He interacted with the Kenya Bird Map team, gave a presentation at the National Museums of Kenya, and was a guest lecturer for the annual Fundamentals of Ornithology course presented by the Museums at Lake Naivasha. He demonstrated the Kenyan version of the Birdlasser atlas software. The trip was sponsored from the Kenyan side. Red Listing of mammals The MammalMAP project has been in a partnership with the Endangered Wildlife Trust and SANBI in the Red Listing of mammals. MammalMAP is itself a partnership between the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria and the ADU. The ADU’s responsibility was the production of distribution maps for the Red List assessors and for the final publication. The MammalMAP team, two cohorts of DST/NRF interns led by Tali Hoffman, assembled half a million mammal records for the assessment database. Rene Navarro undertook the information systems support. The ADU’s role was completed in April. Earthwatch Four of the seven planned Earthwatch teams for 2015 have completed fieldwork on Robben Island. The remaining three teams have complete sets of four volunteers each. Team Four included Alix Morris, communications specialist for Earthwatch in
Boston. She used the opportunity to develop resources which will be used by Earthwatch in future years to recruit volunteers for the project. She also interviewed team members. Her blog report about her two-week experience with the team provides a good insight into the project (See Figure 11 and https://earthwatchunlocked.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/turning-the-tide-for-penguins-in-peril/). Post-fire monitoring on Table Mountain In partnership with the FitzPatrick Institute, Cape Bird Club, UWC and SANBI, the ADU is involved in a project to undertake the monitoring of the recovery of birds in the burnt-out sections of the southern Cape Peninsula, after the fire in March. Sally Hofmeyr and Ashwell Glasson lead from the ADU side. MyBirdPatch is being used as the data-curation protocol. Servers The ADU has instituted a system of regular replacement of its servers, the large computers on which the databases and websites reside, and which deal with the processing of incoming data. The scheduled purchases for both 2015 and 2016 have now been made. The server that was recently taken out of heavy duty is set to become the IPT server.
Staff and citizen scientist project coordinators The core staff of the ADU in 2015 remain Dieter Oschadleus, Michael Brooks, Rene Navarro and Sue Kuyper. Amour McCarthy continues as a temporary staff member responsible for CAR, appointed on contract until the end of 2015, and Megan Loftie-Eaton is the project coordinator for LepiMAP and takes care of much of the Facebook communication. The DST/NRF interns for the first months of the year were Ayesha Mobara, Dane Paijmans, Helene Basson, Nosipho Mali and Sandy de Villiers. The two new interns are Christie Craig and Laurie Johnson, and a donation has enabled us to retain Dane for a further six months. Nosipho has been appointed until the end of the year to strengthen the information systems team of Michael and Rene. Megan Lategan has been appointed through to the end of 2015 as project coordinator for MammalMAP. Sally Hofmeyr plays a key role as a team member in her postdoctoral position doing translational research communication. Ashwell Glasson, chair of the ADU Advisory Board, is playing a key role in the development of ADU strategy. An expanding number of projects have citizen scientists leading them. Within the Virtual Museum family of projects, Darren Pietersen is project coordinator for FrogMAP and ReptileMAP, Astri Leroy is project coordinator for SpiderMAP, Craig Peter for OrchidMAP, Mervyn Mansell for LacewingMAP and Ian Engelbrecht for ScorpionMAP. Jerome Ainsley continues to lead CWAC, the Coordinated Waterbird Counts, and Peter Greaves leads BIRP, the Birds In Reserves Projects. Peter serves as a trustee of the Citadel Conservation Foundation, within the Philanthropy Division of Citadel Wealth Management. The ADU is beneficiary of the Foundation.
Communication A series of Facebook groups and pages are linked, either directly or loosely, to the ADU. The most important of these is the ADU Facebook page, which is located at https://www.facebook.com/animal.demography.unit/. The total number of “impressions” of posting to the ADU Facebook page totals 945300 for the first four months of 2015, 95% higher than the total for the first four months of 2014 (Table 4). Three ADU pages were published in the BirdLife South Africa bimonthly magazine African Birdlife (Figures 12, 13 and 14). We are grateful to BirdLife South Africa for the opportunity provided. Individual members of the ADU Team regularly do presentations at meetings of bird clubs and other groups. Many staff and students avail themselves of the opportunity to do live radio interviews with Tim Neary, who is the host of The Sappi Nature Journal, broadcast on Saturday mornings on Radio Today.
Outlook For the remainder of 2015, the ADU is planning to consolidate the gains of the first six months. There will be a concerted effort to demonstrate the value of the ADU’s biodiversity informatics database to conservation decision-making and planning. The task of motivating citizen scientists to contribute to the ADU’s projects hinges on the knowledge that the data are being pushed up the slope of influence shown in Box 1. Citizen Scientist Days in the second half of 2015 will thus include presentations which describe outcomes of analyses and their implications for biodiversity conservation. This will also be a theme of the postings on the websites and in the Facebook pages and groups. Feedback of significant results, both to citizen scientists and to funders, is recognized to be of paramount importance in the months that lie ahead. There will be an increasing focus on the establishment of partnerships with organisations which share similar goals and values to those of the ADU (Box 2). At least some of these partners will be in other African countries. From the internal perspective, there are three priorities: (1) The development of streamlined processes to simplify the submission of biodiversity informatics data, with apps playing a key role; (2) The completion of the long-term strategic planning exercise; (3) A continued and urgent focus on sustainability and on succession planning.
Tables and figures Table 1. Volumes of data contributed to SABAP2 and the ADU Virtual Museum during the Citizen Science Weeks. The third row of the table gives the average rate per nine-day period from 1 January to 14 June 2015 (ie daily rate multiplied by nine).
Citizen Science Week SABAP2 ADU Virtual Museum
Summer Storm: 31 January – 8 February 42484 3178
Autumn Attack: 25 April – 3 May 38543 3523
2015 average rate per nine day period 31852 1826
Box 2. The core values of the Animal Demography Unit
Conservation: Informing, influencing and motivating biodiversity policy development based on sound quantitative and scientific evidence through our commitment to long-term monitoring and analysis.
Partnership: Nurturing partnerships with people, organizations and governments on the African continent to benefit biodiversity conservation and mutual growth.
Empowering: Enabling people to play a meaningful and living role in the science conversation by transforming Citizen Scientists into “ambassadors for biodiversity”.
Openness: Adopting an “Open Access” data sharing paradigm that maximizes the benefit derived from data collectively gathered, and thus advancing interdisciplinary scholarly research and informing conservation needs.
Innovation: Continuing the pioneering work that has made us leaders in Citizen Science.
Education: Providing training and research opportunities to the next generation of scientists, leaders and environmentalists.
Table 2. Summary of data volumes in the Animal Demography Unit databases, mid-June 2015
ADU Biodiversity Informatics data to be served by SABIF/GBIF
SABAP1 7,477,358 1987-1991 (data from 1980 to 1993)
145425 checklists
SABAP2 7,336,424 2007+
SAFRING 2,458,673 1948+ Ringing records, retraps and recoveries
Virtual Museum 1,257,594 Total records in Virtual Museum
BirdPix 18,118 August 2012
Birds with Odd Plumage 200 March 2012
EchinoMAP 1,394 October 2012
FrogMAP 46,577 1996 includes SAFAP data
LacewingMAP 9,033 Septemer 2014 includes Mervyn Mansell's database
LepiMAP 408,316 May 2007 includes SABCA data
MammalMAP 569,107 July 2010 includes historical data collected for the Red List initiative
MushroomMAP 1,406 September 2014
OdonataMAP 14,288 September 2010
OrchidMAP 2,021 September 2014
PHOWN 27,201 July 2008
ReptileMAP 140,732 May 2005 includes SARCA data
ScorpionMAP 886 March 2013
SpiderMAP 3,987 August 2013
TreeMAP 14,328 December 2010
Total 21,068,576
Table 3. Annual submissions to SABAP2, from 1 July 2007, and the ADU Virtual Museum (from 1 June 20018) and to SAFRING. For SABAP2 and the Virtual Museum, numbers refer to submissions made in the year; for SAFRING numbers refer to the total birds ringed in the year.
Year
SABAP2 Virtual Museum Records (uploads)
SAFRING Checklists Checklists/day FP
Records
2007 1202 6.53 67677 71835
2008 9212 25.17 509357 71446
2009 17095 46.84 917257 72993
2010 18412 50.31 973477 3193 82584
2011 17490 47.92 901505 8692 66298
2012 17037 46.68 895110 17345 56921
2013 17238 47.23 899894 32249 56715
2014 20651 56.58 1087990 56787 56411
14 June 2015
10144 60.29 525658 33481 16482
Total (from start)
128339 6771389 152416
Table 4. Statistics from “Facebook insights” relating to the Animal Demography Unit’s page (https://www.facebook.com/animal.demography.unit). The numbers are the total monthly number of “Impressions” of postings on the page. The total for 2015 is for the first four months of the year, January to April; final totals for May are only available near the end of June.
Figure 1. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Grahamstown
Figure 2. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Port Elizabeth
Figure 3. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Three Rivers, Vereeniging
Figure 4. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Polokwane
Figure 5. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Nelspruit
Figure 6. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Pietermaritzburg
Figure 7. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Durban
Figure 8. Programme for CREST students from Stellenbosch University at UCT
Figure 9. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Kirstenhof, Cape Town
Figure 10. Programme for Citizen Scientist Day in Vredendal
Figure 11. Earthwatch blog on African Penguin project on Robben island: https://earthwatchunlocked.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/turning-the-tide-for-penguins-in-peril/
