Following the closure of the Animal Demography Unit, the project is now managed by the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town.
The project aims to map the distribution and relative abundance of birds in southern Africa, and the original atlas area included South Africa, Lesotho, and Eswatini, although since 2012 the project has expanded to include Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
[3] There are 17,000 pentads in the original atlas area of South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini, and a further 10,000 in Namibia.
Contributors are encouraged to submit 'full protocol' cards, as the information is used to calculate measures of relative abundance, e.g. reporting rate.
Reporting rate is how often a species is recorded across a set of full protocol cards, usually expressed as a percentage.