In news– Kerala has got its first ever scientific bird atlas recently.
About the Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)-
- It is the first-of-its-kind state-level bird atlas in India (Mysore city Bird Atlas is on from 2014).
- It offers authentic, consistent and comparable data through random sampling from the geographical terrain split into nearly 4000 grids.
- It is arguably Asia’s largest bird atlas in terms of geographical extent, sampling effort and species coverage derived from the aggregation of 25,000 checklists.
- Survey for KBA was conducted as a citizen science-driven exercise jointly by the Kerala Agriculture University, Bird Count India involving 1000 volunteers and supported by the Kerala Forest Department.
- KBA was prepared based on systematic surveys held twice over 60 days a year during the wet (July to September) and dry (January to March) seasons between 2015 and 2020.
- Volunteers were deployed across all 14 districts armed with technological tools like Locus Free, an Android GPS application and eBird platform for seamless conduct of the survey and documentation.
- A similar exercise will take place between 2025 and 2030 giving an insight into the changes in the decade since the first KBA.
- It was found that the species count was higher during the dry season than in the wet season while species richness and evenness were higher in the northern and central districts than in the southern districts.
- Most of the endemics were concentrated in the Western Ghats while the threatened species were mostly along the coasts.
- Among the species, White-cheeked Barbet and House Crow with 13,855 and 12,380 occurrence records topped the chart compared to 20 other species, which had just single occurrence records.
Source: The Hindu
