With ever-increasing pressure globally on freshwater resources and, in particular, on wetlands, there is an urgent need to monitor the status of these ecosystems. In this context, waterbirds often serve as flagship and indicator species for the wetland ecosystems which support them. The South Africa Biodiversity Data Pipeline for Wetlands and Waterbirds (the BIRDIE project, https://birdie.sanbi.org.za/), emerges from a collaboration between government, academia, and conservation NGOs, with the overarching objective of serving as a link between South African nation-wide waterbird data collection programmes and conservation managers, researchers and other stakeholders. A key objective of the project is to support South Africa’s reporting and implementation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements such as the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (RAMSAR), the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds Agreement (AEWA), and the Convention on Biological Diversity, in particular, contributing to Red-Listing assessments of waterbird species. <br /><br /> The project uses data from the Coordinated Waterbird Counts (CWAC) and the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (ABAP) to understand the distribution and population dynamics of waterbird species. These citizen-science data are processed with rigorous statistical analysis to gain insights about these processes that raw data might not reveal. CWAC collects abundance data for waterbird species at 688 wetland sites. Since 1992, counts have been done twice a year, in summer and winter, providing good long term records. This information is made available as reports and an interactive map component. This map viewer is also showing the ABAP occupancy models on 144 waterbird species for 16,220 geographical ‘pentads’. Since 2007, more than 17 million records have been collected for ABAP with about 2 million more being added each year. The project also aims to support site management and decision making and, in the future, we hope to see the BIRDIE project expand to other regions and integrate with other biodiversity portals to promote a better understanding of the interactions between different taxonomic groups associated with wetlands.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2024
