SABAP2 is the acronym for the Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2, which is the follow-up to the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (for which the acronym was SABAP, and which is now referred to as SABAP1). The first atlas project took place from 1987 to 1991.[1] The current project was a joint venture between the Animal Demography Unit at the University of Cape Town, BirdLife South Africa, and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). Following the closure of the Animal Demography Unit, the project is now managed by the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town. The project aims to map the distribution and relative abundance of birds in southern Africa, and the original atlas area included South Africa, Lesotho, and Eswatini, although since 2012 the project has expanded to include Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. SABAP2 was launched on 1 July 2007. The field work for this project is conducted by more than 1700 volunteers, known as citizen scientists – they collect the data in the field at their own cost and in their own time. As such they make a huge contribution to the conservation of birds and their habitat.
By June 2015, the SABAP2 database contained more than 128,000 checklists, and a total of 7.4 million records of bird distribution in the project database. In June 2015, the number of SABAP2 records exceeded that of SABAP1 for the first time. More than 72% of the original SABAP2 atlas area (i.e. South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini) had at least one checklist by that time. This information is updated continuously on the project website; see §External links below.
A number of postgraduate research projects have been based partially or completely on SABAP data, either from SABAP1 only, SABAP2 only, or comparing the changes in bird distributions and reporting rates from SABAP1 to SABAP2; and many scientific research articles have also been published on these and other analyses.[2]