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, giving an impetus to futuristic studies.

Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)

• 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 was conducted as a citizen science-driven exercise with the participation of over 1,000 volunteers of the birdwatching community.
• The KBA accounts for nearly three 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.
• 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.

Significance of KBA

• The KBA offers authentic, consistent and comparable data through random sampling from the geographical terrain split.
• 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.
• The KBA is considered to be a valuable resource for testing various ecological hypotheses and suggesting science-backed conservation measures.

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