Scientific progress report July 2002

Bruno A. Walther & Carsten Rahbek

Data acquisition
We have contacted about 200 individuals or organizations via mail or email asking for data or references. About 80 people have responded and send data, references or contact addresses (see Acknowledgments).

We have entered more than 3500 citations into an Endnote reference library, with most of them containing data on Palearctic migratory birds in Africa.

We have entered more than 35000 individual records into an Access database, with more records entered on a daily basis.

We have about another 10000 individual records entered into Excel spreadsheets that will in due course be entered into the Access database.

Modelling of species distributions
We have obtained about 40 environmental coverages of Africa at a 0.05 degree resolution, including climatic data coverages for annual and monthly averages of temperature and rainfall, and data on altitude, habitat and human population density.

We will collaborate with Mary Wisz who will help with GARP-modelling approaches (see Peterson A. T. et al. 2002. Future projections for Mexican faunas under global climate change scenarios. Nature 416: 626-629).

We will collaborate with Neil Caithness who will help with PCA-modelling approaches (see Robertson M. P., Caithness N., Villet M. H. 2001. A PCA-based modelling technique for predicting environmental suitability for organisms from presence records. Diversity and Distributions 7: 15-27).

Publications
We have published the project outline in: Walther BA & Rahbek C. 2002. Where do Palearctic migratory birds overwinter in Africa? Dansk Ornitologisk Forenings Tidsskrift 96: 4-8 (preprint version).

We have started to write a paper that will describe several different modelling approaches, using the wintering distribution of the Golden Oriole Oriolus oriolus as a first test case. This paper will be co-authored by Sabine Baumann, Mary Wisz, Neil Caithness, and Carsten Rahbek.

We have published a referenced list of Western Palearctic bird species migrating within Africa on the internet.