Bird Data of Namibia

Overview

Many more data have been collected on birds than any other group of species in Namibia. These data represent an extremely valuable source of information on a variety of aspects such as recent and historical distributions, density, breeding characteristics and habitat use. The data can potentially be used for numerous purposes such as conservation and management planning, ecological and behavioural studies. By using data from several sources, it is often possible to derive an 'overall picture' which is not provided by using just one data set alone. In addition, when used in conjunction with comparable data on other taxa such as plants, mammals and reptiles, these data provide a unique and invaluable management and planning tool.

Some uses of the bird data are:

• Identification of indicator species of habitat quality and change, particularly species at the top of the food chain e.g. raptors (birds of prey)
• Identification of key habitats and sites for targetted groups of birds e.g. wetlands which qualify for international protection under the Ramsar Treaty
• Comparative assessments of changes in raptor densities across the country in relation to factors such as land use changes, habitat degradation, rainfall
• Identification of Important Bird Areas based on congruence of bird groups such as Red Data species, wetland species, raptors

Data sets include:

• Bird Atlas data, under the SABAP (Southern African Bird Atlas Project)
• Wetland count data
• Raptor road count data
• Nest record data
• Historical data from museum specimens
• Detailed data on endemic species

The Avifaunal Database

The Namibian Avifaunal database project started in January 1997, under Namibia's National Biodiversity Programme, with the aim of compiling Namibia's bird data onto a Microsoft Access database and developing a user-friendly interface to facilitate the easy use of these data by people with an interest in biodiversity and conservation.

The database was described in a comprehensive user manual. As well as information on the database and how to use it, this contains a lot of information on the data sets and can be downloaded here.

• Contents, Acknowledgements, Introduction and Overview. [8 pages; pdf; 1.2 MB]
• Section 1. Using the menus to do things quickly and easily. [86 pages; pdf; 7.0 MB]
• Section 2. Structure and design of the Avifaunal Database. [24 pages; pdf; 1.3 MB]
• Section 3. Practical uses of the database and how to design new queries and reports to achieve them. [3 pages; pdf; 48 KB]
• References. [1 page; pdf; 22 KB]

This website

Whilst the resulting database holds a huge amount of data and allows the easy extraction of information, it is relatively inaccessible, especially to people outside Windhoek. This website represents the first steps towards putting Namibia's bird data into the public domain. The development of this website has been funded by the Namibia Environmental Fund through DANIDA, under Raptors Namibia.

Links

See the sites below and the links within them for more information:

• Raptors Namibia
• Namibia Crane Working Group
• Coastal Environmental Trust of Namibia