The Animal Demography Unit's Virtual Museum Report for 2013 - http://vmus.adu.org.za/

1. Virtual Museum Report: 2013
Les Underhill and Megan Loftie-Eaton - Animal Demography Unit - University of Cape Town

2. 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!!

3. Two new taxa were
added in 2013:
ScorpionMAP was
started in March for
scorpions and
SpiderMAP was
launched in August for
spiders

4. 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!

5. 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
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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. The instructions for
submitting records to the
Virtual Museum are available at
http://www.slideshare.net/meg
anloftieeaton/how-to-submitrecords-to-the-animaldemography-units-virtualmuseums-28710898