The Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2) is the most important bird monitoring project in the region. It holds this status because all other conservation initiatives depend on the results of the bird atlas, to a greater or lesser extent. You cannot determine the conservation status of a species unless you know its range and how this is changing. So red-listing depends on the results of this project. So does the selection of sites and habitats critical to bird conservation. SABAP2 is the follow-up project to the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (for which the acronym was SABAP, and which is now referred to as SABAP1). This first bird atlas project took place from 1987-1991. The second bird atlas project started on 1 July 2007 and plans to run indefinitely. The project aims to map the distribution and relative abundance of birds in southern Africa and the atlas area includes South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. SABAP2 was launched in Namibia in May 2012.

The field work for this project is done by more than two thousand one hundred volunteers, known as citizen scientists - they are making a huge contribution to the conservation of birds and their habitats. The unit of data collection is the pentad, five minutes of latitude by five minutes of longitude, squares with sides of roughly 9 km. There are 17339 pentads in the original atlas area of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, and a further 10600 in Namibia, 4900 in Zimbabawe and 6817 in Kenya.

At the end of June 2017, the SABAP2 database contained more than 189,000 checklists. The milestone of 10 million records of bird distribution in the SABAP2 database was less than 300,000 records away. Nine million records was reached on 29 December 2016, eight months after reaching on 14 April 2016, which in turn was eight months after reaching seven million on 22 August 2015, and 10 months after the six million record milestone. Knocking of a million records in eight month periods is become an awesome norm. More than 78% of the original SABAP2 atlas area (ie South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland) has at least one checklist at this stage in the project's development. More than 36% of pentads have four or more lists.

The most pressing data collection needs are to get coverage as complete as possible, and to try to build a foundation of four checklists per pentad. On top of this foundation the skyscraper of checklists can be built. Ideally, we would like checklists representing every month of the year. We would also like to have lots of checklists for each pentad in every year.