Dr Sam Ivande, from the University of Nigeria, will present the Department of Biological Sciences seminar with a talk entitled, "Citizen Science in Nigeria:  a by-product of the Nigerian Bird Atlas Project". 

Dr Sam Ivande started university planning to become a pharmacist. Instead, he became a biologist. He did his BSc (Hons) in Biology at Ahmadu Bello University, his MSc in Conservation Biology at the University of Jos, and a PhD in Zoology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Jos and the Project Manager of the Nigerian Bird Atlas Project (NiBAP).

Sam will tell us about NiBAP - Nigeria’s first initiative for nationwide bird monitoring by citizen scientists. This project is an initiative of APLORI with technical support from the Animal Demography Unit, UCT. The protocol is the same as that used for the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project. The aim is to produce up-to-date distribution maps for birds in Nigeria. Fieldwork got underway at the end of 2015, and in a little over two years, 840 “pentads” have been visited, representing about 7.5% of this huge country. One of the project’s biggest successes has been the development of a community of citizen scientists, with bird clubs emerging in many regions of the country. The largest of these is a group that calls themselves SWAT, the South West Atlas Team, which consists of 25 active citizen scientists and which has covered more than 200 pentads in eight states in the southwest of Nigeria. This proliferation of bird clubs is unprecedented in Nigeria and the rate of progress and coverage is remarkable especially for a country where a bird watching culture has largely been lacking and is only just being developed.