Unfortunately the speaker scheduled to present the Zoology Departmental Seminar tomorrow has had to postpone their talk following unforeseen circumstances.

Professor Les Underhill has agreed to fill the time slot at very short notice. He will present a live demonstration of some of the ADU's websites and the data contained in the databases behind them. The title will be "Data, data everywhere, and a flood of analysts needed to mine it" and a brief abstract is below. The presentation will take place at 13h00 tomorrow as normal and will be preceded by tea and coffee from 12h30.

Abstract: Data-mining is a big topic in statistics these days. The Animal Demography Unit (ADU) is sitting on a goldmine of data, around 15 million records, mostly collected by citizen scientists. The database of the First Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP1) has generated more than 50 papers (of which only a handful have UCT co-authors) and about 10 PhD/MSc projects have done analyses of the associated database, which contains about 7.3 million records. But everything done to date on this database, and the others curated by the ADU, is still scratching the surface of what can be done with these data.  The reptile atlas, the butterfly atlas, and the forthcoming mammal atlas make extensive use of the concept of the "virtual museum" (VM). This is a clever piece of software developed in the ADU; the butterfly VM currently contains about 22000 images of butterflies. I will demonstrate how the VM operates - there might well be other applications for this technology within the department. The objective of this presentation is to try to show the breadth and extent of databases and data collection tools available in the ADU, and invite collaboration.

Date: 22nd February 2012
Venue: Zoology Museum
Time: 13h00 to 14h00

Craig Whittington-Jones, Gauteng ornithologist and ardent ADU project supporter, was recently interviewed by African Raptors, an on-line raptor forum, concerning the plight of the African Grass Owl. Craig is co-chair, together with Geoff Lockwood (another ardent ADU stalwart), of the African Grass Owl Task Force established by the Endangered Wildlife Trust in 2009 to research population declines and look at conservation measures for this species.

This interview was borne out of the range-change map which was put up as a latest news item during September 2011. Data that had been received for this endangered raptor during SABAP2 revealed that reporting rates were lower than SABAP1 and that there was perhaps some range contraction occuring. This grassland specialist is largely under-recorded but atlas data does seem to provide some evidence that there is cause for concern.

It is encouraging that through initiaves like SABAP2 we can start to build early warning systems for species, and that through active involvement of the African Grass Owl Task Force appropriate conservation measures can be proposed and implemented to safegurad this species' survival into the future. Currently Craig is busy compiling the provincial conservation assessment for the species in which he has made extensive use of data from various ADU projects, including CWAC, BIRP, SABAP1 and SABAP2. 

To read the interview click here

Tali Hoffman, the coordinator of the ADU's newest atlasing project, MammalMAP, will present a lecture in the Department of Zoology & Entomology of the University of Pretoria. The lecture is on Tuesday, 28 February, at 14h30, and is in lecture hall 2-11 of the Zoology Building.

Tali's talk will be entitled MammalMAP – the African Mammal Atlas Project and the abstract is below:

ABSTRACT: In Africa, our knowledge of mammal distribution patterns is based largely on historical records. However, the last three centuries have seen extensive human-modification of African landscapes with the associated conversion, compression and fragmentation of natural land. With further land development presenting a likely reality for the future, the effectiveness of mammal conservation efforts will be reliant on the updating of ecological records to accurately reflect mammal distribution patterns in the 21st Century. Although these updates occur inadvertently through small-scale ecological studies, these typically only address the distribution of select species and or populations in particular locations. More comprehensive efforts include studies that map the predicted distribution of mammals in larger geographical areas based on their historical distribution and their habitat requirements. However, there remains a glaring lack of broad-scale, empirical studies that comprehensively map the current distribution of mammal species across the African continent. In this talk I'll be explaining how the ADU is planning to remedy this information deficit over the next few years.

Dr Simon Elwen, of the Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria, is presenting a talk in the Zoology Lecture Theatre 2, John Day Zoology Building, at UCT, this coming Monday, 20 February, at 13h00. The talk is entitled Conservation ecology of cetaceans in Namibia: conservation and development in a 'pristine' environment.

ABSTRACT: Namibia has over 1500 km of coastline, almost all of which is protected as a series of National Parks. In 2009 Namibia's first Marine Protected Areas was declared to protect seabirds and marine resources in the southern part of the country. Despite these national levels of protection, large scale coastal development and mining activities continue throughout the country and a large marine tourism industry impacts directly on several marine mammal species. A lack of data on species occurrence, distribution, seasonality, population size (etc) is generally ignored during the impact assessment process with unknown effects on the animals in question. The Namibian Dolphin Project has been studying cetaceans in Namibian since 2008, concentrating mainly on coastal dolphins (Heaviside's dolphins and and a small resident population of bottlenose dolphins). We present results from four years of study in the Walvis Bay area, including threats, trends and some potential solutions to conservation at a local level and aim to raise awareness of issues (the 'known unknowns') at a broader scale.

The ADU has made a substantial contribution to the seabird component of NIMPA, the Namibian Islands Marine Protected Area. This is an opportunity to hear about the marine mammals with which the seabirds share the environment.

Les Underhill, director of the ADU, was awarded a PERC grant from the University of Cape Town. The purpose of the award is to "Expand Weaver Research in Africa" via WRAP (Weaver Research Africa Project). The formal launch of WRAP was held yesterday at the UCT Research Offices. There were three talks:
Robert Morrell, introduction to PERC
Les Underhill – Why weavers?
Dieter Oschadleus – Dial in to PHOWN

Weavers are the most fascinating family of birds among the Passerines. There are species, like the Red-billed Quelea, which are "food security" problem, by descending on grain crops in flocks numbering millions; the quelea is "Africa's feathered locust." There are species which are "energy security" problems; for example the Red-billed Buffalo Weaver builds nests in transmission lines, and causes outages; see this example. Not all weavers are superabundant, or even common: the Mauritius Fody is "critically endangereed", with a population of about 250 birds. From an ecological perspective, the weavers show an amazing diversity in almost every aspect of their life history strategies. Of the 117 species of weavers in the world, 112 are endemic to Africa, so through WRAP we are grasping one of Africa's great ornithological research opportunities.

One of the ways that citizen scientists throughout Africa can participate in WRAP is by submitting records to PHOWN (PHOtos of Weaver Nests). This is one of the ADU's Virtual Museum projects. Here is a list of PHOWN priorities.

A flyer has been designed by Marja Wren-Sargent to promote PHOWN – please download it and please feel free to email this pdf to anyone who may be interested in taking part! Download here.

To have a look at the original announcement of the launch, see here.