FBIP:IZIKO-UCT:Historical Survey (1930-1980)

Around the 1930’s Stevenson and Day along with the University of Cape Town (UCT) started up the UCT ecological survey project which aimed to create a reference collection of the biodiversity along the southern African coastline and various other localities around the world (e.g. Beaufort shelf transect Alaska, Madagascar, etc.) (Griffiths et al. 2010). Initially the survey/project was conducted along the shoreline of southern Africa (estimated collection areas: 36). The survey/project was later expanded to surveying the estuaries of southern Africa (estimated collection areas: 17). The survey/project was completed by conducting deeper water trawls and dredges of the west, south and east coast of southern Africa. It is important to note that each collection area contains various collection sites, for example False Bay (collection area) contains an estimated 856 collection sites. The reference collection and registers were donated to the IZIKO South African museum in the 1960’s by UCT. Numerous amounts of literature have been published by using the data in the registers (Barnard 1951, Stock & Day 1959, Stock & Day 1962, Griffiths 1974, Blaber 1974 and Griffiths et al. 2010). Currently there are a number of taxanomic projects underway, that rely on the data contained within the registers. By making the data available in a sensible electronic format will greatly improve the time taken to complete current and future projects that rely on the registers for data. Along with the reference specimen collection it also contains a vast number of observational records, which could potentially provide a massive historical database of species occurrences dating back to more than forty years ago. Datasets such as these could potentially give us greater insights into the effects of global change on biodiversity (Chapman 2005, Chapman 2010).