Avifaunal Diversity in Kolkata and its Urban Extensions: A Cross-sectional Study

Subhadeep Sinha, Arijeet Majumdar, Shreya Ghosh, Anirban Ghosh

Abstract


Kolkata Metropolis is one of the largest urban settlements in South-eastern Asia at the lower Gangatic planes. With a history of 350 years of urban development, the city witnessed rapid extension of its urban boundaries for last couple of decades. In this study, we documented and compared the avifauna diversity of core urban settlements and its expanding peripheral sub-urban regions through cross-sectional sampling, listing, ranking, plotting and diversity indexing. About 140 species of birds were found in the area within the study period. The urban core showed lower diversity than peripheral sub-urban regions. Diversity pattern showed that sub-urban avifauna community contained high number of rarer species than core urban Kolkata. Notably, avifauna community in urban core is indicating a more stable community structure in comparison to its sub-urban counterpart. So with higher diversity, the outer Kolkata possesses more fragile avifauna community. These findings indicated that the shock of urbanization of distant past might have recovered by avifauna community of Kolkata and adjusted to a lesser diversity, but avifauna of its sub-urban fringes are now in more susceptible state.

Keywords


Avifauna; Kolkata; Diversity; Community

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