ABC African List

We now have the full ABC African region list available on BUBO Listing (for which we're grateful to members of the ABC Council for their permission to use it, as well as time and effort in discussion about it).

Previously we allowed the entire Clements world list to be used as a base for Africa lists but we have now removed this ability, since the ABC list is much more appropriate. Therefore we would like all BUBO Listers who have existing Clements Africa lists to copy these to ABC-based ones. You should all have received an email with more details, but if you have any questions just ask.

As you know we have several individual African countries supported using the ABC country lists . We would like to complete this, so if you have a country you'd like to see supported as a priority then let us know. If you'd like to help with this task (it's not difficult, or too time-consuming!) then we'd be very grateful.

Hi
No hurry over this - but I will want a Tanzanian list for next year!
Exciting!
It will need to include Pemba endemics.
Thank you

Corinna

MIke

I have not (as yet - Sunday 19/9 eve) received any email about transfering African list from Clements to ABC

Richard

Hi Richard

A problem with AOL it seems: I've had two emails to AOL addresses giving a delayed delivery error, but saying that delivery attempts will continue. Let me know if you haven't had it within a couple of days.

The AOL emails did fail for some reason, so here is the text of the email that went out to all BUBO Listers with existing Clements-based Africa lists:

This email is being sent to all BUBO Listers who have entered Africa lists. We are pleased to announce that we now have the official ABC (African Bird Club) list for the African region available: www.bubo.org/Checklists/african-bird-club-abc.html

This means that no longer do Africa lists on BUBO Listing need to use the full Clements world species list. The new ABC list is more accurate, uses species names more established within the region and makes it much easier, and more interesting, when you are looking at target species. It will, as with other lists on BUBO Listing, be kept up to date as and when we are aware of changes. We already had several individual African countries supported using the ABC list, and will eventually get all countries on board.

We would appreciate it if all existing Africa listers could convert their existing Clements Africa list to an ABC Africa list. This just takes a few seconds by logging in to BUBO Listing and going to Create New List. Select Africa and you will see that ABC appears as the only available authority now. Then ensure you change the “Choose preferred method to add species to the new list” to be “Copy from existing list” and select your existing Africa list. This will copy all the species for you. There are some taxonomic differences between Clements and the ABC list and if any are found that impact you these will be highlighted– you may be able to add some “armchair ticks” to your list!

Once this is done, and you are happy that all species are included, please delete your old Clements Africa list by going to Delete List, selecting it from the list, and hitting the Delete List button.

Thanks for taking the time to do this, and I hope you enjoy the improved Africa lists. If you have any comments or queries feel free to reply direct to me, or post them in the BUBO Listing Africa forum: www.bubo.org/Forum/Africa/ If there are any particular African countries you’d like to see supported as a priority then let us know, and if you would like to help with this then even better!

just to say ... transfered my Clements based Africa list across to ABC - got 35 species "not available on ABC taxonomy" with a list of "additional species available on ABC taxonomy" - I've started adding these species back in and actually the vast majority are exactly the same English & Latin names in Clements and ABC so don't know why not transferred across - there is some glitch in the system? - not a problem - I'll just finish adding them in manually.

The somewhat confusing situation you mention is "the Greenish Warbler effect", as mentioned under "splits" on our taxonomic update page. This is where the pre-split species has the same name as one of the post-split species. BUBO Listing treats the the pre-split and post-split species as different (which they are in terms of the subspecies they contain) so that we can identify whether your lists have any taxonomic updates pending, and to make copying lists more accurate. Because we allow copying lists between different authorities and different regions it's tricky to know which subspecies is required so we can't automate the copy in all cases. Generally we hope that the number of these apparent odd updates is quite small so it's not too much hassle to do manually!