28 Jan 2022 First Scientific Bird Atlas
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South Indian state of Kerala has launched its first Scientific Bird Atlas and with this it has also come that this bird atlas is Asia’s largest bird atlas in terms of geographical extent which has 25,000 Checklist coverage.
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Kerala Bird Atlas is the first of its kind state level bird atlas in India under which solid baseline data has been prepared to know where different species of birds are found. In which areas their population is more or less?
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This atlas covers all the major bird habitats i.e. Bird Habitats. It has been designed as a citizen science driven exercise in which 1000 volunteers from the bird watching community participated.
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This bird atlas has been prepared by conducting two bird surveys every year in the wet and dry seasons from July to September and January to March respectively between 2015 and 2020.
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The Kerala Bird Atlas contains about three lakh records of 361 species. There are 94 very rare bird species, 103 rare species, 110 common species and 44 very common species and 10 abundant species.
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A provision of 4000 grids has been made under this atlas for estimation of birds. Research related to this has also found that the number of birds has been found in the dry season as compared to the wet season, while the species richness and species evenness are found in the northern and central districts of Kerala rather than the southern cities.
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The survey was conducted in all the 14 districts and it used technological tools like Locus free which is an Android GPS application and e-Bird platform to facilitate the survey and documentation in a seamless manner.
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