South African SAFARIS - Acocks Field Notes 1

South African vegetation through the eyes of one man over a period of 40 years. John Phillip Harison Acocks (7 April 1911 Cape Town - 20 May 1979 Middelburg, Eastern Cape) used his observations to create the map of the Veld Types of South Africa that underpinned South African vegetation and botanical work for over 50 years (1953 to 2005). Acocks recorded his travels and sampling of more than 20 000 specimens, sampling at over 3 600 sites, recording over 390 000 species-locality observations. Many of his records are in amazingly neat writing. This forms an incredibly valuable source of information for biodiversity studies. Join the SAFARIS – Southern African Friends and Researchers Indexing Specimens, an initiative of South African National Biodiversity Institute

It is important if using this approach to first click the Save unfinished record button. You can be taken out of a task if you haven't refreshed it for more than 2 hours, and it could be terribly frustrating when you wish to continue, to find that your work has been taken over by someone else.
A topographical map from 1936 with Acocks' sites marked by him, points showing where he was known to have been by date, and gazetteer can be downloaded (about 3 GB). Please do not expand abbreviations or indicate crossed-out text. Record what is written (or what it appears that Acocks intended as his edited end result). The total number of tasks for this dataset is: 95, number transcribed is 95 and number validated is 51.