The project is ongoing, and is now managed by the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town.
SABAP covered six countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini and Zimbabwe.
Fieldwork was conducted mainly in the five-year period 1987–1991, but the project coordinators included all suitable data collected from 1980–1987.
[3] Project coordination was undertaken by the Avian Demography Unit (ADU) at the University of Cape Town.
The final product of the project was a two-volume set of A4-sized books, covering 932 species, with a total of 1500 pages, published in 1997 by BirdLife South Africa.
[3] The Atlas of Southern African Birds was, at the time of publication, the largest biodiversity project ever conducted in Africa.