Virtual Museum 2014 – progress to Voting Day 7 May 2014

Les Underhill and Megan Loftie-Eaton

Animal Demography UnitUniversity of Cape Town

During 2013 we added 32249 records to the Virtual Museum. Up to 7 May, we have already added 20016

records in 2014, 60% of the whole of last year!!

The most spectacular progress has been made by LepiMAP. 7365 records have been added

already this year

LepiMAP is the Atlas of African

Lepidoptera. LepiMAP is a citizen

science project which aims to determine

the distribution and conservation priorities of

butterflies and moths on the entire African

continent

The total number of records in the Virtual Museum database has grown to 607427,

including non-photographic records, mainly museum specimens, for butterflies,

frogs and reptiles

The big publishing event of 2013 was the the “butterfly atlas” – the

big event of 2014 so far is the publication of the reptile atlas, the

culmination of the Southern African Reptile Conservation

Assessment (SABCA) which was launched in April

There are now more than 10000 records in PHOWN, which collects PHOtos of Weaver Nests for the 117 species of weaver in the world, of which 112 are

endemic to Africa and the other five to southern

Asia

OdonataMAP, for dragonflies and damselflies, needs 357 records to reach 10000. This project has generated new species for South Africa, and made a

massive contribution to range expansions

The first thing needed to do a conservation assessment of a species is an accurate and

current distribution map. Please help us build the 21st century distribution maps for

thousands of species

Unless we get your piece of the jigsaw

puzzle, the distribution maps for a species will

be incomplete

The instructions for submitting records to the Virtual Museum are

available at http://www.slideshare.net/meganloftieeaton/how-to-submit-records-to-the-animal-demography-units-virtual-museums-28710898