Virtual Museum Report: 2013

Les Underhill and Megan Loftie-Eaton - Animal Demography Unit - University of Cape Town

We started 2013 with 29268 records in the Virtual Museum, and ended it with 61517. So the database more than doubled in size, with 32249 records being

added!!

Two new taxa were added in 2013:

ScorpionMAP was started in March for

scorpions and SpiderMAP was

launched in August for spiders

Perhaps the surprise of the year was with OdonataMAP, we started 2013 with 2998 records and ended with 7163 records, a growth of 169%, a

doubling plus two-thirds more records than were there at the start of the

year!

The Virtual Museum also contains the records of specimens in museums for reptiles, frogs and butterflies, and these total half a million records. So the total size of the Virtual Museum is 580 000 records.

The count of records began in June 2010 when the “upload-over-the-internet” system started. Prior to that, records,

only of butterflies and reptiles, were sent by email and uploaded manually at the ADU. 16000 records were uploaded in

this way

There were milestone events for the Virtual Museum in 2013, and two involved

butterflies. The “butterfly atlas” – the culmination of the Southern African Butterfly

Conservation Assessment (SABCA) – was launched in April

In October, SABCA morphed into LepiMAP, the Atlas of African

Lepidoptera. Whereas SABCA was limited to butterflies, LepiMAP includes both

moths and butterflies. SABCA was limited to South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland;

LepiMAP’s parish is Africa

MammalMAP partnered with EWT and SANBI to launch the revision of the Red Data Book for mammals in South

Africa. MammalMAP is responsible for

producing the distribution maps

In December, Project Painted Lady was launched to highlight the

importance of not overlooking a common and widespread butterfly

species, and to promote the LepiMAP concept

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