NMW is thrilled to announce our new partnership with LepiMap, the Atlas of African Lepidoptera.
Megan Loftie-Eaton, LepiMAP Project Coordinator, gives us the following info on their project:
LepiMAP is an awesome Citizen Science project run jointly by the Lepidopterists Society of Africa (LepSoc) and the Animal Demography Unit, University of Cape Town. LepiMAP is the continuation of SABCA (the Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment), and it aims to determine the distribution and conservation priorities of butterflies and moths on the African continent. Yes, you read correctly, LepiMAP is an Africa-wide project! We want butterfly and moth records from all over Africa!
LepiMAP represents an excellent opportunity to make your photography count for conservation. We are building up a huge database of photographs (along with the locality information) of butterflies and moths throughout Africa. LepiMAP is “phase 2” — in phase 1 we built up a database of more than 300 000 records of butterfly distributions, so we have demonstrated that we can build distribution maps using this approach. Please help us build onto this database, and enable LepiMAP to produce the 21st century distribution maps for Africa’s Lepidoptera. Unless our knowledge of the ranges of species and how they are changing is based on solid evidence, conservation initiatives will only be based on anecdotes and the person with the loudest voice. So please do upload your photos of butterflies and moths to the LepiMAP database. The website at which you do the uploading is athttp://vmus.adu.org.za/ — Join the conservation conversation! LepiMAP is a great way to involve the public in Lepidoptera conservation. Spread the news! Get your family and friends involved and let’s get out there and start LepiMAPping!!
You can submit data to LepiMAP via the following sites:
http://www.slideshare.net/
http://www.slideshare.net/