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Saturday Stats: two weeks 4–17 August 2012

Due to last weekend's atlasing expedition to the Knersvlakte, this report covers two weeks. The SABAP2 growth these past two weeks was 26877 records, on 604 checklists. Checklist length averaged 44.5 records, probably a bit depressed because of the large number of relatively short lists from the Knersvlakte expedition – the picture above was taken by Peter Nupen.

During the two weeks, 86 pentads were atlased for the first time ever. 19 were in the Northern Cape and 11 in the Western Cape with many of these 30 done during the Knersvlakte expedition last weekend, 14 were in the Eastern Cape, and 17 in Namibia. In addition 17 new pentads were done in Botswana. SABAP2 will curate atlas data from anywhere in Africa, in the hope that it will form part of a national atlas project sometime in the future.

For SABAP2012, which counts the number of pentads actually visited in 2012, the increase was from 3567 to 3779 pentads, so 212 pentads were visited this week which had not been visited earlier in the year. Another 31 pentads need to be visited to get the SABAP2012 coverage to 22%. The initial SABAP2012 target is currently 5470 pentads, the number of pentads visited last year. This number still increases slowly, as checklists are submitted. If you have SABAP2 from earlier years, please submit it, it never goes stale!

SpringMAP2012 is our project to collect as much data as possible during this year's migrant arrival period. SpringMAP2012 started on 8 August, and already has 276 checklists for 245 pentads. To monitor arrival, it is best if we have regular checklists for as many pentads as possible. The is simply measured as checklists per pentad, so currently 276/245=1.13 checklists per pentad.

The number of people who have "liked" the ADU's page on Facebook grew to 640. This is rapidly becoming the best consolidated source of ADU news. The page is at www.facebook.com/animal.demography.unit.