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What is the news?
The Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA) has been released.
What is Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)?
It is the first-of-its-kind state-level bird atlas in India.
The Atlas is arguably Asia’s largest bird atlas in terms of geographical extent, sampling effort and species coverage.
It was conducted as a citizen science-driven exercise with the participation of over 1000 volunteers of the bird watching community.
The atlas has created data about the distribution and abundance of various bird species across all major habitats for futuristic studies.
What are the key findings of the Atlas?
The species count was higher during the dry season than in the wet season in Kerala.
Species richness and evenness were higher in the northern and central districts of Kerala than in the southern districts.
Most of the endemic species were concentrated in the Western Ghats while the threatened species were mostly along the coasts.
The survey ignored the short duration passage of migrant species.
Source: This post is based on the article ‘Kerala gets its first ever scientific bird atlas’ published in The Hindu on 25th January 2022.
