IBA Reports

As part of Birdlife Botswana’s commitment to maintaining a network of sites that are critical for birds both nationally and internationally, the Makgadikgadi Pans Important Bird Area (IBA) is monitored annually following BirdLife’s global monitoring framework. This framework is based on the State – Pressure – Response model that has been adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and this report is divided into three parts paralleling these components. Part 1 deals with the state of the Makgadikgadi Pans IBA, with particular emphasis on the ‘trigger’ species of birds that ‘qualify’ the area as an IBA. Part 2 focuses on pressures or threats to the IBA - these were originally identified by Tyler and Bishop (1998), but some of these have been superceded and a current set of issues has been identified through fieldwork. These threats need to be ranked so that they can be incorporated into the global monitoring framework. Part 3 of the report describes the conservation actions undertaken in response to the identified threats. These actions are a measure of progress made towards addressing or mitigating the threats. The actions also need to be objectively ranked for incorporation in the framework. 

In 1998, BirdLife Botswana (the BirdLife partner in Botswana) identifi ed and documented 12 sites as Important Bird Areas (IBAs) of Botswana. However, monitoring efforts at these sites have lacked adequate co-ordination and the success of management and conservation efforts have, therefore, been diffi cult to gauge. In 2007, BirdLife Botswana, together with seven other African countries (Burkina Faso, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) benefi ted from European Commission funding to pilot a reporting mechanism for biodiversity through the monitoring of birds at IBAs using the Pressure-State-Response model adapted from the global IBA monitoring framework. 

In Botswana, the target sites for the project are IBAs overlapping protected areas, of which there are seven: Chobe, Linyanti Swamps, Okavango Delta, Makgadikgadi Pans, Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Mannyelanong and Kalahari Transfrontier Park IBAs. This is the third year of project implementation and this report summarizes the analysis of data and information gathered during 2009 and compares them with the fi gures from the 2008 report. Out of the seven protected IBAs of the project focus, 2009 records were received from all of them as well as Lake Ngami, which is not a site included in the project scope, but the data recorded from this site were included in the analysis anyway as they were seen to be important and relevant IBA.

The Important Bird Area (IBA) Programme was established by BirdLife International as a global initiative to identify, protect and manage a network of sites that are important for the long term viability of naturally occurring bird populations, across the geographical range of those species for which a site based approach is appropriate. In Africa, one of the recent initiatives of the programme is a project Instituting effective monitoring of Protected Areas (Important Bird Areas) as a contribution to reducing the rate of biodiversity loss in Africa. Funded by the European Union, this project was implemented from 2007 to 2011, in eight African countries (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Kenya, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe). It adopted the methodology of using birds as environmental indicator species. The methodology used is the State–Pressure–Response model.