DeJaVU

DeJaVU is dé jà vu ("the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a situation previously") because it is identical to last summer's BASH. Well almost identical. It is SABAP2's communal project for December and January, exploiting the atlasing opportunities presented when lots of us are able to travel far and wide on summer holiday.

In the same way as LAMP and WHAMB were, in the first place, unashamedly deep, so DeJaVU's first priority is to be provacatively wide.

The objective of LAMP and WHAMB was to get lots of repeat data for pentads, because this is the best way to quantify departure and arrival.

The first objective of DeJaVU is to document the distributions of as many species as possible, as comprehensively as possible, throughout the SABAP2 region, in midsummer 2009/10. So the primary focus is to get as many pentads visited (or revisited) as possible.

At the same time, we want to have lot of repeat visits to pentads. Diligently conducted repeat checklists, carefully following the protocol, are invaluable for developing an index of abundance for each species this summer. So we are also very happy if atlasers go deep this summer, and we have set some deep targets too.

We want to get 80% of the people who have ever contributed to SABAP2 out into the field for DeJaVU. So the target number of observers will be 500.

We will try to visit 15% of the 17310 pentads in the SABAP2 region – that's a target of 2600 pentads. That is equivalent to visiting half the pentads that have been visited since the start of the project.

We would like 600 of those pentads to be new pentads. That is more than two Gautengs – in fact it is 2.2 Gautengs.

The target number of checklists for December and January is 4000, or 2000 per month. The largest number of checklists that has ever been submitted for a single month is approaching 1600, so this is a formidable challenge. We'd like the average list length to be long – around 55 species, so that gives a target of 220000 records in the two months.

Although the emphasis in DeJaVU is going wide, we also want to set some simple deep targets too: 100 pentads with more than five checklists and 25 pentads with more than 10 checklists.