What is it about?
Citizien science projects are becoming increasingly popular worldwide as a means of collecting data over wide spatial and temporal scales. However, optimising these data sets is still an active field of exploration. The Karoo region is an arid zone area with poor spatial coverage. By leveraging the information of a community of birds we provide a measure of estimating populations for some of the regions rarest and sparsest bird species.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The arid zones of the planet are some of the most under-surveyed, especially by citizien science projects that are spatially biased towards locations where people live. This publication allows a better understanding of how many birds there are in this arid zone environment, especially important for the rare 'Near Threatened' Sclater's Lark.
Perspectives
As an active contributor to South Africa's Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2); it was a great opportunity to be able to conduct a wide scale on the ground survey of the birds of the Karoo Biome, in conjunction with BirdLife South Africa and SANBI's Karoo BioGaps project. This allowed me to explore how reporting rates (the measure of abundance for SABAP2) related to ground truthed density estimates.
Dr Alan Tristram Kenneth Lee
University of Cape Town
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Modelling bird atlas reporting rate as a function of density in the southern Karoo, South Africa, Ostrich, October 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.2989/00306525.2018.1553804.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
