The Atlas of Seabirds at Sea, to be known in the vernacular as AS@S, pronounced "ay-sass", was launched on 16 October 2009, as part of the "Save Our Seabirds Festival" of BirdLife South Africa's Seabird Division.

AS@S is the marine analogue of SABAP2, the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project, which is gathering records of bird distribution on the mainland.

Initially, what AS@S will try to do is to provide a database into which all observations of seabirds at sea, made according to a standard protocol, can be curated. Data which are obtained at sea will be submitted to the project via this website, and will immediately be incorporated into the database. In addition, a large amount of historical data, collected using the same protocol, will be captured into the project as soon as funding becomes available. The AS@S database will rapidly grow into a valuable resource for understanding the abundance and timing of the distribution of seabirds at sea, and for examining how these have changed through recent decades.

Although AS@S is launched with the oceans to the west, south and east of South Africa uppermost in our minds, the system is designed in such a way that it will accept data from any part of the earth's oceans.

The project is a joint initiative of BirdLife South Africa, the Animal Demography Unit at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It is a sister project to SABAP2 and currently falls within the orbit of the SABAP2 Steering Committee.

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