Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)

In News 

• Recently, the Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA) created solid baseline data about the distribution and abundance of various bird species across all major habitats giving an impetus for futuristic studies.

About 

• It is the first-of-its-kind state-level bird atlas in India.
• 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.
• It was conducted as a citizen science-driven exercise with the participation of over 1000 volunteers of the bird watching community.
• It 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.
• Significance: 
  • It offers authentic, consistent and comparable data through random sampling from the geographical terrain split into nearly 4000 grids.
  • It is considered to be a valuable resource for testing various ecological hypotheses and suggesting science-backed conservation measures.
• Findings:
  • It was found that the species count was higher during the dry season than in the wet seasons.
  • 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 coast.
  • The survey ignored the short duration passage of migrant species.

Source:TH