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Namibian Wildlife Surveys archive

This archive of reports of wildlife surveys in Namibia aims to:

  • provide easy public access to published information and statistics
  • enable easy stakeholder access to recent and historical data on wildlife populations
  • provide a comprehensive archive of wildlife survey reports in Namibia

Public access to information is a vital component of ensuring community engagement in prevalent issues. Wildlife surveys are critical to determine the health of wildlife populations and determine trends over time to guide conservation and management actions. 

Wildlife surveys are done for different species using methods that are suited to counting them (e.g. by air or road) in their natural habitats. Such surveys need to be repeated over time to detect long-term trends and inform conservation managers. The Namibian government, non-governmental organisations and private reserves all conduct regular surveys covering different parts of Namibia and targeting different species. This archive will thus serve as a repository of our collective knowledge of the trends and status of a variety of species occurring throughout Namibia.

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Displaying results 1 - 3 of 3
Martin MJ, Gridley T, Roux J-P, Elwen SH 2020. First abundance estimates of Heaviside's (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii) and Dusky (Lagenorhynchus obscurus) dolphins off Namibia using a Novel Visual and Acoustic Line Transect Survey . Frontiers in Marine Science

Knowledge of a population’s abundance is of primary importance for conservation management. However, robust estimates of abundance are often difficult to obtain, especially for cetaceans which spend most of their lives submerged. Cetacean abundance is commonly estimated using aerial or vessel-based line transect surveys and distance sampling methods. During 2012–2014, the first line transect surveys to estimate cetacean abundance were conducted in Namibian waters.

de Rock P, Elwen SH, Roux JP, Leeney RH, James BS, Visser V, Martin MJ, Gridley T 2019. Predicting large-scale habitat suitability for cetaceans off Namibia using MinxEnt. Marine Ecology Progress Series 619 149-167

Knowledge of the occurrence and distribution of cetaceans is particularly important for conservation and management, but is still limited within Namibian waters. We collated 3211 cetacean records from the Namibian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for the period 2008 to 2016 and applied the principle of minimum cross entropy (MinxEnt) to predict habitat suitability. MinxEnt is a generalised form of maximum entropy modelling that allows incorporation of additional information such as sampling bias.

Potgieter GC 2019. Angolan island paradise for Cape Cormorants. Conservation and the Environment in Namibia (2019)

Take a close look at the image above. Each black dot is a Cape Cormorant (see below) as seen from a light aircraft. Can you count the cormorants? This aerial view of a colony of Cape Cormorants is a composite of several of the thousands of images taken during a 2017 survey of Ilha dos Tigres, an island off the coast of Angola. The purpose of this survey was to document all visible animals using this island, so every dot counts!

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