Michael Brooks

University of Cape Town | UCT · Department of Biological Sciences

Introduction Efforts to collect ecological data have intensified over the last decade. This is especially true for freshwater habitats, which are among the most impacted by human activity and yet lagging behind in terms of data availability. Now, to support conservation programmes and management decisions, these data need to be analyzed and interpr...

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 longitu...

The COVID-19 lockdown has had a marked effect on citizen science projects, such as the Southern African Bird Atlas Project, SABAP2. With their mobility severely constrained, most citizen scientists in South Africa were not able to submit full protocol lists during the Alert Level 5 lockdown. There was a 70% decline in full protocol list submissions...

Southern Africa is on its second bird atlas project, with the second starting 16 years after fieldwork for the first was completed. The paradigm of the second atlas project has evolved so that it aims to monitor bird species in both space and time, producing a “movie” rather than a “snap-shot” of distribution. The second project uses a five-minute...

Overall, the conclusion has to be that the Cape Vulture is extremely likely to have experienced a major decrease in abundance in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland in the two-decade period between SABAP1 and SABAP2

Overall, the conclusion has to be that the Glossy Ibis certainly seems to have increased in both range and abundance over the Western Cape in the two-decade period between SABAP1 and SABAP2. Its fortunes appear to be mixed over the remainder of South Africa, with some clear regions of increase and some clear regions of decrease. The atlas database...

Overall, the most likely scenario is that the expansion in range and increase in abundance which the African Spoonbill clearly experienced for most of the 20th century has come to an end. It appears likely that the spoonbill has started to decrease in abundance in the two decades since SABAP2. Because of its nomadic behaviour, counts of African Spo...

his paper shows the current range of the Maccoa in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, using the data from the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2), and compares this distribution with the map generated by the first bird atlas project (SABAP1), two decades previously. The information presented in this paper makes two key points: (1)...

This paper shows the current range of the Hamerkop in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, using the data from the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2), and compares this distribution with the map generated by the first bird atlas project (SABAP1), two decades previously. The results are alarming, and it is clear that the Hamerkop ne...

In this chapter we review and assess the potential impacts of fracking on Karoo ecosystems, based on related research from across the world, and interpreted in terms of the ecological characteristics and features of Karoo ecosystems. We highlight the dominant vegetation types, habitats and species which are characteristic or of conservation signifi...

The purpose of the citizen science weeks of the ADU is to increase awareness of, and encourage participation in, the citizen science projects of the ADU. This article summarizes participation in the Cape Union Mart Heritage Hunt, the citizen science week that took place over the period Saturday 24 September through to Sunday 2 October 2016. 3,137 p...

This paper recommends strategies for undertaking bird atlasing in Africa, making use of aspects of the SABAP2 protocol, in such a way that it is compatible with it. We call this protocol the BirdMAP protocol. The key element of compatibility is the five-minute grid system which generates cells known as pentads

The interaction between government policy and bird distributions was one of the themes running through the results of the First Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP1). However, this observation was never explicitly transformed this idea into the "red thread" for a review of bird distributions in southern Africa. This theme, the impact of land...

Ornithological Observations accepts papers containing faunistic information about birds. This includes descriptions of distri breeding, foraging, food, movement, measurements, habitat and plumage. It will also consider for publication a v relevant ornithological material: reports of projects and conferences, annotated checklists for a site or regio...

Climate change directly affects every major human development issue – energy, food, health, transport, housing, disaster management, poverty and sustainable development, to list a few. Our global response to the climate change challenge will have environmental, economic, social and political repercussions for decades, even centuries to come. In the...