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Saturday Stats

This is the Saturday Stats quick update on weekly progress. The week is Saturday 30 June to Friday 6 July.

SABAP2 completed five years of fieldwork on 30 June, and started its sixth year on 1 July. This project has been so effective at monitoring birds in both space and time that it is unthinkable to stop. The 5P Celebratory Challenge starts today, 7 July. The details are here. Please report your progress on the SABAP2 Facebook group! If you are not yet part of this, do join, because lots of interesting interchanges between atlases take place there.

During the past week, 384 checklists were submitted. Wow, that is more than 50 checklists a day. It would be fantastic if we could keep this level of momentum going. For 2012 so far, we have averaged 46 checklists per day.

The number of records added was 16803. So the average length of this week's checklists was 44. In midsummer, when all the migrants are with us, checklists average 58 species. We cannot underline enough how important these winter checklists are, wherever you are in the atlas region. They document the absence of species, and provide the baseline against which the timing of the return of migrants can be measured.

An impressive 41 pentads were atlased for the first time. 19 of these were in the Northern Cape, and the remainder spread around the remaining regions fairly evenly. 24 pentads got their second checklist (and changed from YELLOW to ORANGE on the coverage map). 35.3% of all pentads are ORANGE or darker. With overall coverage at 62.0%, subtraction tells us that 26.7% of pentads have exactly one checklist. 12 pentads got their fourth checklist (and changed from ORANGE to LIGHT GREEN). 20.5% of all pentads are GREEN or darker. Turning the 26.7% of YELLOW pentads to ORANGE, and then moving them on to LIGHT GREEN is an important new goal for the project. Let's GREEN this coverage map.

SABAP2012 was also a winner of the week. 120 pentads were added. These are pentads which had not been atlased earlier in 2012 (41 were new to the project, and 79 had been atlased in previous years but which were visited for the first time in 2012!). SABAP2012 is on 18.95%, with an initial goal of overtaking SABAP2011, which reached 31.5%.

SABAP2 in Namibia reached 1% coverage. Each 1% increase in coverage in Namibia needs another 106 pentads to be atlased, so it is a huge challenge. We will get a "gap analysis" on the website for Namibia soon, but as Holger Kolberg, who is leading SABAP2 in Namibia says: "1% coverage means that 99% has yet to be covered so at the moment we have more gaps than non-gap." All atlasers visiting Namibia are encouraged to atlas, and it is clear that "incidendental records" and "ad hoc lists" are going to be even more important in Namibia than they are in the remaining SABAP2 region.