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.
