The reptile atlas project (SARCA) started just as digital cameras and hand-held GPS units were becoming affordable. The reptile atlas implemented the concept of the Virtual Museum as the way in which citizen science could participate in the project. Digital photos and the GPS coordinates of snakes, lizards, chameleons, tortoises, etc, were incorporated into the project database. When the butterfly atlas (SABCA) started, it also implemented a Virtual Museum. Both these Virtual Museums have continued to accept images after the formal completion of the projects, so that SARCA2 and SABCA2 will one day be able to hit the ground running.

Perhaps the choice of the word "museum" was unfortunate. For most people, the "museum" is the place where one or two specimens of each species on display. This certainly is what the "public space" in museums looks like. But the ADU's Virtual Museums replicate the "research space" in the museum. Every museum has a door with a sign "Private: Staff Only" – go through that door, and you find the real museum, with thousands of neatly labelled specimens, in bottles and drawers. There are frequently vast numbers of specimens of a single species. The ADU's Virtual Museums are like this. Our specimens are photographic images of animals rather than the real thing, hence the term "Virtual Museum" – as in the real museum, each of images has a label, giving date, species and location. Our Virtual Museums are delighted to have thousands of images of the same species, from throughout its range, because this is how we are able to build up atlas distribution maps.

The virtual museum for the butterfly atlas continues in partnership with LepSoc (Lepidopterists' Society of Africa). It is the largest of the ADU virtual museums, with nearly 24 000 records, and is expanding rapidly. The new MammalMAP project, the atlas of mammals throughout Africa, plans largely to base its distribution maps on records which are supported by photographs. This new project already has 5 300 records in its database.

The ADU supports eight virtual museums. Explore them by visiting vmus.adu.org.za. The protocol for uploading pictures is straightforward. You need to register as an ADU observer (you can do this on the virtual museum website) before you can do a "Data upload" – but if you have registered for any ADU project, you can immediately upload images. If you don't have a GPS there is a Google Map on which you can find the coordinates of the locality where you took the picture.

The ADU Virtual Museums are receiving almost 2000 records per month. If you have pictures of reptiles, butterflies, dragonflies, mammals and even weaver nests, please upload them into the Virtual Museum, where they will be used to make a difference for conservation.

The Animal Demography Unit is recognized as one of the "earth stewardship" funding priorities of the University of Cape Town – the UCT website says: "Now in its 20th year, the ADU started out as a project-oriented group. It has maintained and expanded this focus on citizen scientists, encouraging them to become ambassadors for biodiversity. The unit is fast becoming the leading centre of research expertise in Statistical Ecology in Africa, with 22 doctoral students since 2002. This impressive track record now poses a further challenge of maintaining the ADU's momentum through building an early warning system to monitor biodiversity trends in both space and time."

We take this opportunity to invite all our supporters to become part of the community that directly supports and sustains the ADU in its triple mission: Citizen Science, Digital Biodiversity, Statistical Ecology. There is still time to contribute before the South African tax year ends on 29 February 2012. Donations to UCT are tax deductible in terms of Section 18A of the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962. Please use the link below for the ways to give to the ADU at UCT (in the section "Please direct my support to:" click on the line "other" and enter "ADU"):

https://www.uct.ac.za/dad/giving/ways/online/

"UCT aspires to become a premier academic meeting point between South Africa, the rest of Africa and the world. Taking advantage of expanding global networks and our distinct vantage point in Africa, we are committed, through innovative research and scholarship, to grapple with the key issues of our natural and social worlds." UCT recognizes that the ADU is playing an important role in this aspiration. In the natural world, it is self-evident that we grapple with the issues of biodiversity conservation. What is less obvious is our role in the social world, where our citizen scientists reach tens of thousands of people through being ambassadors for biodiversity.

Following the successful ADU 20th anniversary celebrations at Kirstenbosch on 11 June and Pretoria on 15 October, our next celebratory event takes place in KwaZulu-Natal, at the National Botanical Gardens in Pietermaritzburg. The event will take place on Saturday 11 February 2012 in the Clivia Room. This is in fact our final 20th anniversary event.

The programme for the day involves ADU staff and supporters. It will start at 10h00 (tea/coffee from 09h30), we will have a picnic lunch together, and the programme will end around 15h00. This is an opportunity to interact with fellow volunteers from the full variety of ADU projects and to celebrate 20 years of ADU citizen science in South Africa. Our objective is to have a programme designed to provide feedback on our citizen science projects, and how the resulting data are used in science and conservation.

Registration is now open for this event. Go to http://20.adu.org.za to sign up. There is no charge and entrance to the gardens (if you do not have a BotSoc card) will be at the student rate (R8.00).

The 2012 UCT Summer School programme is now on the on the Department of Extra Mural Studies's Summer School website. One of the "courses" on offer is being presented by the ADU, and is called Citizen Science: Building an Early Warning System for Biodiversity. This course will be presented in the second of the two weeks of Summer School (23–27 January). The description of our course is in the paragraph below. Here is a list of all the courses being presented at Summer School next January, and the full details are on the Summer School website. The pdf of the brochure containing information on all the Summer School courses on offer next January is there too. So are the online registration forms.

CITIZEN SCIENCE: BUILDING AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM FOR BIODIVERSITY

The Animal Demography Unit (ADU) has been building digital biodiversity databases for twenty years. Most have been collected by "citizen scientists" in a variety of projects. About 16 million records of biodiversity cover mainly birds, reptiles, butterflies and mammals. This course, which forms part of the ADU's twentieth anniversary activities, looks at the lessons learnt over two decades and considers the potential role of citizen science in helping to build an early warning system for biodiversity. For each project we ask: "How have the data been used, especially in conservation applications?" "What difference does the participation of citizen scientists make to the project?" And ultimately, "How does this make a difference to the animals themselves?" Assembling the jigsaw puzzle of biodiversity out of the individual pieces of data contributed by citizen scientists requires intensive data analysis and interpretation. The first lecture looks at the way in which the ADU uses the citizen science database to interpret how and why the distributions and abundance of species have changed and what can be done about it. The second lecture considers the butterfly atlas and the "butterfly census weeks" developed to monitor trends in butterfly populations in South Africa. The third and fifth lectures focus on the involvement of citizens in bird monitoring, one related to the bird atlas and the other to bird ringing. The new mammal atlas which aims to compile information about mammals in the whole of Africa, including Madagascar, is highlighted in the fourth lecture.

LECTURES: 1. Citizen science – Les Underhill; 2. Butterfly atlas – Silvia Mecenero; 3. Bird atlas – Doug Harebottle; 4. Mammal atlas – Tali Hoffman; 5. Bird ringing – Dieter Oschadleus.

This information is also available here.

The 2012 UCT Summer School programme is now on the on the Department of Extra Mural Studies's Summer School website. One of the "courses" on offer is being presented by the ADU, and is called Citizen Science: Building an Early Warning System for Biodiversity. This course will be presented in the second of the two weeks of Summer School (23–27 January). The description of our course is in the paragraph below. Here is a list of all the courses being presented at Summer School next January, and the full details are on the Summer School website. The pdf of the brochure containing information on all the Summer School courses on offer next January is there too. So are the online registration forms.

CITIZEN SCIENCE: BUILDING AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM FOR BIODIVERSITY

The Animal Demography Unit (ADU) has been building digital biodiversity databases for twenty years. Most have been collected by "citizen scientists" in a variety of projects. About 16 million records of biodiversity cover mainly birds, reptiles, butterflies and mammals. This course, which forms part of the ADU's twentieth anniversary activities, looks at the lessons learnt over two decades and considers the potential role of citizen science in helping to build an early warning system for biodiversity. For each project we ask: "How have the data been used, especially in conservation applications?" "What difference does the participation of citizen scientists make to the project?" And ultimately, "How does this make a difference to the animals themselves?" Assembling the jigsaw puzzle of biodiversity out of the individual pieces of data contributed by citizen scientists requires intensive data analysis and interpretation. The first lecture looks at the way in which the ADU uses the citizen science database to interpret how and why the distributions and abundance of species have changed and what can be done about it. The second lecture considers the butterfly atlas and the "butterfly census weeks" developed to monitor trends in butterfly populations in South Africa. The third and fifth lectures focus on the involvement of citizens in bird monitoring, one related to the bird atlas and the other to bird ringing. The new mammal atlas which aims to compile information about mammals in the whole of Africa, including Madagascar, is highlighted in the fourth lecture.

LECTURE TITLES

1. Citizen science – Les Underhill

2. Butterfly atlas – Silvia Mecenero

3. Bird atlas – Doug Harebottle

4. Mammal atlas – Tali Hoffman

5. Bird ringing – Dieter Oschadleus

This information is also available here.

One of the last of the chain of events lined up to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ADU this year is our Summer Digital Biodiversity Week, from next Saturday 29 October, through to the following Sunday 6 November, so it includes two weekends. One of our main focuses during 2011 has been a celebration of the participation and involvement of citizen scientists in building our digital biodiversity databases, now totalling some 15 million records. The objective of the "digital biodiversity weeks" is to give all our citizen scientists a chance to become a community with the objective of collecting and submitting as much biodiversity data as we are able during the week. The winter biodiversity week ran from Saturday 23 July to Sunday 31 July. We will probably make them bi-annual events.

We want to try to involve as many of our existing citizen scientists as possible. We want to recruit new people to our citizen science team. We want to collect as much biodiversity data as possible: so we will try to count the total number of records entering the various databases, and try to determine the total number of different species we record. We want to encourage Team Citizen Science.

We would be delighted if our citizen scientists participated in more than one project, and especially if they participated in one they had not been involved in before. So we want our bird atlasers to participate in VIMMA, the VIrtual Museum for Mammals, our bird ringers to take pictures of weavers' nests for PHOWN, PHOtos of Weaver Nests, and our CAR and CWAC counters to give bird atlasing a try, etc. We particularly want to grow awareness and participation in the growing family of virtual museums: see http://vmus.adu.org.za. A new project, which was launched during the Winter Digital Biodiversity Week was MyBirdPatch, and if you have not yet got involved in this please give it a try.

This is also a great opportunity to try to expand the citizen science team. The best way to do this is to invite someone new to join you atlasing, ringing, counting, virtual museuming, ... and to show them the project protocols – for example, exactly how to go about bird atlasing.

Ultimately, the goal of all the data collection is to have impact on biodiversity conservation. The wealth of data and information contributed by our citizen scientists, collated and curated at the ADU, and analysed by our students and staff and by many other people, has improved biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Our 20-year celebrations honour you, the citizen scientist. Thank you for your on-going support from all of us at the ADU. Together we are making a difference!

We held a very successful ADU 20th anniversary celebration event at Kirstenbosch in June. The next event in this series will be in Pretoria on Saturday 15 October. The venue for the Gauteng "open day" is the Education Centre in the Pretoria National Botanical Gardens.

The Animal Demography Unit was established at UCT in 1991, then as the Avian Demography Unit, with SABAP1 and SAFRING as the two main projects. Additional citizen scientist projects followed: CWAC (Coordinated Waterbird Counts), BIRP (Birds In Reserves Project) and CAR (Coordinated Avifaunal Roadcounts). These have remained part of the ADU's ongoing, long-term, citizen-science monitoring programmes and have collected millions of records over the last 20 years.

Due to the ADU's 'atlasing' expertise, other animal groups were included under the atlasing umbrella. The Southern African Frog Atlas Project (SAFAP) was completed in 2004, and the Southern African Reptile Conservation Assessment (SARCA) the Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment (SABCA) are being completed in 2011. SABAP2 started in 2007, and has been supplemented recently with the MyBirdPatch project.

The ADU is also involved in numerous other research projects and the tally of successful PhD students in the past decade alone is currently 22. Our Virtual Museums have proved popular and successful and contain 31 000 georeferenced images of butterflies, reptiles, frogs, mammals, dragonflies, weaver nests and trees.

The participation and involvement of citizen scientists has enhanced the wealth of data and information stored at the ADU and increased out impact on biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Our 20-year celebrations honour you, the citizen scientist. Thank you for your on-going support from all of us at the ADU. Together we are making a difference!

On 15 October, the programme will include short and snappy presentations on most of these projects, by ADU staff and our partner organisations. We will start at 10h00 and have a picnic lunch together, and end around 15h00. Our objective is to have a programme designed to provide feedback on our citizen science projects, and how the resulting data are used in science and conservation. This is an opportunity to interact with fellow volunteers from the full variety of ADU projects and to celebrate 20 years of ADU citizen science in South Africa.

Registration is open for this event. If you have not already registered, go to http://20.adu.org.za, and click on "register" at the top to sign up. There is no charge and entrance to the gardens (if you do not have a BotSoc card) will be at the student rate. We are grateful to SANBI for enabling this use of their facilities.In this unusual aerial view of the gardens, the Education Centre is in the centre at the top, nestling within the little group of trees in the grassland (and the restuarant is in the bottom right hand corner!).

Another of the chain of events lined up to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ADU this year was the Winter Digital Biodiversity Week, which finished yesterday, 31 July. Here are some first results; there is lots of data collected which still needs to be submitted.

SABAP2 atlasers submitted 472 checklists with a total of 22 963 records. The number of new pentads atlased was 42. This was in spite of weather over most of the country for most of the period which was not particularly conducive to atlasing! There does not appear to be a lot of old data in notebooks, but a handful people told us of their backlogs, but were unable to clear it last week. At least we have sensitized everyone to the fact that we don't mind how long it takes to get the data submitted.

There were 405 submissions to the various virtual museums, plus a bulk submission of 1639 records from the Cape Leopard Trust, our partner in VIMMA, the mammal VM. The weaver colonies for PHOWN are summarized on the weaver website, http://weavers.adu.org.za. So far, there are records for nine species, with 16 submissions of Cape Weavers and 14 of Southern Masked Weavers.

MyBirdPatch, the new small-scale bird monitoring project, launched during the Digital Biodiversity Week, attracted 34 observers, who registered 44 "MyBirdPatches", and made 86 checklists totalling 1672 records.

The CAR project held its winter count on Saturday. Results have still to arrive. A lot of ringers were out as well during the week, but likewise, the statistics of their activities will take a week or two to compile.

One of our main focuses of the ADU's 20th anniverary is a celebration of the participation and involvement of citizen scientists in building our digital biodiversity databases, totalling some 15 million records. The objective of our Digital Biodiversity Weeks is to give all our citizen scientists a chance to become a community with the objective of collecting and submitting as much biodiversity data as we are able during the week. The Winter Digital Biodiversity Week ran from Saturday 23 July to Sunday 31 July. There will be another in early summer, which will span the actual date of the 20th anniversary. The dates for the Summer Digital Biodiversity Week are 29 October to 6 November.

Other events still in the pipeline are the "Citizen Science Day" at the Pretoria National Botanical Gardens on 15 October, and a week of lectures at the UCT Summer School in January.

We have a chain of events lined up to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ADU this year. One of our main focuses is a celebration of the participation and involvement of citizen scientists in building our digital biodiversity databases, totalling some 15 million records. The objective of our "digital biodiversity week" is to give all our citizen scientists a chance to become a community with the objective of collecting and submitting as much biodiversity data as we are able during the week. The winter biodiversity week runs from Saturday 23 July to Sunday 31 July, so it includes two weekends. There will be another in early summer, which will span the actual date of the 20th anniversary. The dates for the summer digital biodiversity week are 29 October to 6 November.

We want to try to involve as many of our existing citizen scientists as possible. We want to recruit new people to our citizen science team. We want to collect as much biodiversity data as possible: so we will try to count the total number of records entering the various databases, and try to determine the total number of different species we record. We want to encourage Team Citizen Science.

We would be delighted if our citizen scientists participated in more than one project, and especially if they participated in one they had not been involved in before. So we want our bird atlasers to participate in VIMMA, the VIrtual Museum for Mammals, our bird ringers to take pictures of weavers' nests for PHOWN, PHOtos of Weaver Nests, and our CAR counters to give bird atlasing a try, etc. We particularly want to grow awareness and participation in the growing family of virtual museums: see http://vmus.adu.org.za.

This is also a great opportunity to try to expand the citizen science team. The best way to do this is to invite someone new to join you atlasing, ringing, counting, virtual museuming, ... and to show them the project protocols – for example, exactly how to go about bird atlasing.

Ultimately, the goal of all the data collection is to have impact on biodiversity conservation. The wealth of data and information contributed by our citizen scientists, collated and curated at the ADU, and analysed by our students and staff and by many other people, has improved biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Our 20-year celebrations honour you, the citizen scientist. Thank you for your on-going support from all of us at the ADU. Together we are making a difference!

The year 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the Animal Demography Unit, or the ADU as it is known in the vernacular. It was towards the end of 1991 that the University Research Committee formally approved the establishment of the ADU as a research group at the University of Cape Town. Even at that time, achieving this recognition was something of an achievement in its own right.

At the start of the anniversary year we steal a glance backwards. The list of publications, graduated students and conference presentations from 2010 alone runs to six pages (137KB). Of the six students who graduated, four were PhDs at UCT, one was a PhD at the University of Bristol in the UK, and one was an MSc at the University of Wageningen. Looking farther back in time, the list of postgraduate students (11KB) supervised or co-supervised in the ADU in the first decade of the 21st century runs to 28 students: 18 PhDs and 10 MScs. The pdfs of most of the PhDs are available on the ADU website (scroll down to graduated PhDs).

A series of anniversary events will unfold during the year. The first major event is the SAFRING/SABAP2 conference at Barberspan Bird Sanctuary from Wednesday 9 March to the following Wednesday 16 March. The "conference" will take place over the weekend from Friday evening 11 March to Sunday afternoon 13 March, but everyone is invited to arrive and start atlasing or ringing from the Wednesday beforehand and stay until the Wednesday afterwards.

Among the celebrations, there will also be two "citizen science biodiversity weeks": 23–31 July and from 29 October–6 November. This second period includes the actual 20th anniversary date! These biodiversity weeks will involve all the ADU projects, from the birds to the butterflies, dragonflies, mammals, reptiles, trees and weavers, through the Virtual Museums. Diarize the dates – details will unfold.

A noteworthy recent development in the ADU has been the upgrading of the Virtual Museum (VM) software. The key change is that photographs are now uploaded via the internet, rather than being sent by email. This has enabled new VMs to be initiated and old ones to be continued with renewed vigour: Butterflies, Dragonflies plus Damselflies, Frogs, Mammals, Reptiles and Weaver Nests. The VM for mammals is called VIMMA (Virtual Museum for Mammals) and is initiated in conjunction with the Cape Leopard Trust. The VM for weaver nests is called PHOWN (PHOtos of Weaver Nests). The VM software is expandable to include other concepts and we welcome suggestions.

Between ADU staff, students and our research associates, the final tally of papers and chapters in books for 2009 was 64. Three of the postgraduate students graduated last year, two with PhDs and one with an MSc. The details of paper and postgraduates are here (pdf 119KB). The list of papers and graduates so far in 2010 is here (pdf 61KB). A total of 25 students have gained PhDs or MScs through ADU supervision (or cosupervision) since 2000, the students and thesis titles are listed here (pdf 11KB). In September 2010, there are four postdocs in the ADU, and 10 PhDs and five MScs. Two PhDs have been submitted for examination.

Between us, we presented a total of 22 papers and posters at the 7th International Penguin Conference in Boston, US, and the First World Seabird Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The authors and titles are here.

During August, the CAR project produced a booklet which describes 12 practical suggestions which can be implemented by landowners to conserve birds on farmland, and discusses these in relation to some key bird species such as Blue Crane, Denham's Bustard, Southern Black Korhaan and White Stork. The booklet is in English: Farming for the Future (2.5MB) and in Afrikaans: Boer vir die Toekoms.

From 1 January 2008, the Avian Demography Unit (or the ADU for short) will become the Animal Demography Unit (still the ADU). What prompted this? Ever since the ADU initiated the frog atlas project a decade ago in 1998, there have been issues with the name Avian Demography Unit – “Why is the Avian Demography Unit doing the frog atlas?” This inconsistency has recently been heightened by our involvement with projects on reptiles (Southern African Reptile Conservation Assessment, effectively the reptile atlas), and with butterflies (Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment, the butterfly atlas), and with five postgraduate students doing PhD and MSc projects on seals, one on rare mammals in Namibia and even one on dwarf chameleons.

Although the academic world thrives on these kinds of delightful contradictions, there is no need to perpetuate them for ever. We will thus change our name to be more representative of what we do. We also change our host department at the University of Cape Town, resolving another anachronism, moving from the Department of Statistical Sciences to the Department of Zoology.