Significance:• The Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2) – initiated in 2007 – is one of the region’s longest-running citizen science programmes and collects spatial and temporal data on birds. • Data from the project are publicly available and used extensively by environmental impact assessment practitioners, conservationists, authors, protected area managers, scientists and the general public.• The project is the template for other established projects that now operate across the continent, collectively now falling under the ‘African Bird Atlas Project’ umbrella.• We show that since the initiation of SABAP2, there has been a three-fold increase in publications, with over 150 papers that can be attributed to SABAP2. • The contribution of citizen scientists to the published scientific domain has been enormous
