UPSC Articles
Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)
Part of: Prelims
Context: The Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA), the first-of-its-kind State-level bird atlas in India, has created solid baseline data about the distribution and abundance of bird species across all major habitats.
Key takeaways
- It is Conducted as a citizen science-driven exercise.
- The KBA has been 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.
- It accounts for nearly three lakh records of 361 species.
- It is arguably Asia’s largest bird atlas in terms of geographical extent.
Key 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.
News Source: TH
