Scientific progress report July 2003

Bruno A. Walther & Carsten Rahbek

Data acquisition
We have contacted about 300 individuals or organizations via mail or email asking for data or references.  Over 100 people have responded and send data, references or contact addresses (see Acknowledgments).

We have entered almost 4000 citations into an Endnote© reference library, with most of them containing data on Palearctic migratory birds in Africa.

We have entered over 60000 individual records into an Access© database.

Database publication
We have set up a working agreement with DanBIF (Danish Biodiversity Information Facility) to set up an internet-based data provider which will allow to search the Access© database with species-, country- and date-specific queries.

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 intend to collaborate with Mary Wisz who will help with GARP (Peterson A. T. et al. 2002. Future projections for Mexican faunas under global climate change scenarios. Nature 416: 626-629), BIOCLIM (Busby JR 1991. BIOCLIM - a bioclimatic analysis and prediction system. pp. 64-68 in Margules CR, Austin MP eds. Nature conservation: cost effective biological surveys and data analysis. CSIRO, Melbourne, Australia) and multi-model inference modelling approaches (Burnham KP, Anderson DR 1998. Model selection and inference: a practical information-theoretic approach. Springer Verlag, New York, USA).

We intend to 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
Walther BA, Baumann S, Wisz MS, Caithness N, Rahbek C. In preparation. Investigating the wintering grounds of the golden oriole Oriolus oriolus using GIS modelling.

Walther BA, Wisz MS, Rahbek C In preparation. In preparation. Modelling the winter distributions of Basra Reed Warbler Acrocephalus griseldis and Cinereous Bunting Emberiza cineracea with GIS analyses.

Walther BA, Wisz MS, Schäffer N, Rahbek C. In preparation. Modelling the winter distributions of Aquatic Warbler Acrocephalus paludicola with GIS analyses.

Wisz MS, Walther BA, Rahbek C. In preparation. Correlates of Western Palearctic Migrant Bird Occurrences in sub-Saharan Africa.

Walther BA, Wisz MS, Rahbek C. In preparation. Migration Strategies of Palearctic Passerines in Africa: links to rainfall patterns and insect abundance.