Kerala's first-ever Scientific Bird Atlas

Context: Conducted as a citizen science-driven exercise with the participation of over 1000 volunteers of the bird watching community Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA), 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.

About the Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)

• KBA accounts for nearly 3 lakh records of 361 species, including 94 very rare species, 103 rare species, 110 common species, 44 very common species, and 10 most abundant species.
• KBA is the first-of-its-kind state-level bird atlas in India.
• 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.
• It has created solid baseline data about the distribution and abundance of bird species across all major habitats, giving an impetus to futuristic studies.
• 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 coast.
• However, the survey ignored the short duration passage of migrant species.