The African Bird Atlas Project: a description of the project and BirdMap data-collection protocol

Abstract

The African Bird Atlas Project (ABAP) is a citizen-science bird-monitoring programme that relies on a robust, repeatable protocol (BirdMap) and allows insights into the distributions of African birds and their conservation. The protocol involves collecting bird lists within spatial sampling units called pentads (5 × 5 minutes of latitude by longitude), in relation to survey effort. It is based on the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2), which is one of Africa’s largest citizen science projects, with over 600 thousand checklists, comprising ∼19 million bird locality records as of December 2021. SABAP2, which focuses on southern Africa, was initiated in 2007 and is ongoing. Both the Kenya Bird Map and the Nigerian Bird Atlas Project, initiated in 2013 and 2015, respectively, use this protocol. These projects have galvanised local birdwatching communities and allow for important comparisons across sub-Saharan African countries. The spatial scope of ABAP covers the entire African continent. Bird species lists are collected by citizen scientists within a pentad, with each list encompassing a minimum of 2 hours of active birding over a maximum of 5 days in the preferred ‘full-protocol’ format. Lists that do not meet the full protocol requirements are called ‘ad-hoc’. Species lists are mostly submitted to the SABAP2 database at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, by the third-party mobile phone application BirdLasser. Incoming data are vetted against existing records, with unusual records verified by Regional Atlas Committees. Data are open access via public websites. Distributional records can be downloaded for each species in the database, or site-specific species lists in various formats can be downloaded for pentads. Here, we introduce technical details of the database to inform researchers on how the data are gathered and curated. Data-access protocols are explained, with examples of data use given from the publication record.