Dieter Oschadleus, PhD. (Team leader) Dieter studied Physics at UCT obtaining a BSc in 1987 and BSc(Hons) in 1988. Dieter started bird ringing / bird banding while studying at UCT. Dieter obtained an MSc in Physics (radioactive dating of Kuiseb calcretes in Namibia). He served on the committee of the Northern Transvaal Ornithological Society (now Pretoria Bird Club) during 1996 and 1997. In 1998 Dieter took up the post of Bird Ringing Coordinator at SAFRING to coordinate bird ringing / bird banding in South Africa, a post he held for 20 years. He also worked to establish AFRING, a project to curate bird ringing / bird banding data from the rest of Africa. He completed a PhD in 2005 on the primary moult patterns of southern African weavers using the SAFRING database and his own bird ringing / bird banding records.
Prof Les Underhill Les has been Director of the Animal Demography Unit (ADU) at the University of Cape Town since it started in 1991. Although citizen science is Les’s passion, his background is in mathematical statistics. He was awarded his PhD in 1973 at UCT. He retrained himself as an applied statistician. Gradually the application of his statistics narrowed down to data analysis problems in biodiversity and took him into statistical ecology. The initial research focus of the ADU was on birds, starting with the first bird atlas project; it rapidly broadened to cover mammals, butterflies, frogs, fish, reptiles and dragonflies. Les has supervised or co-supervised 22 MScs and 30 PhDs, and mentored 17 post-doctoral fellows. He has the Herschell Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa (1999), and BirdLife South Africa’s Gill Memorial Medal for a lifetime of outstanding service to ornithology (2017).
Megan Loftie-Eaton, PhD. Megan is passionate about biodiversity conservation and believes in the power of citizen science. She obtained her BSc in Environmental & Conservation Sciences through the University of Alberta, Canada. In 2011 she went on to complete her MSc in Zoology at the University of Cape Town, and in 2018 she completed her PhD, looking at the impacts of bush encroachment on bird distributions in the savanna biome of South Africa.
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