Avifauna of Saurashtra University Campus, Rajkot, Gujarat, India

Abstract

We examined the avifauna of Saurashtra University Campus (SUC), Rajkot, Gujarat from July to December 2017. The study area was divided into four sections: North (N), East (E), South (S) and West (W) and surveyed over 18 visits (four line transects/visit). We recorded a total of 82 bird species from 67 genera, 40 families and 16 orders. Of these 57 species were terrestrial and 25 aquatic. By population size the most abundant birds were members of Columbidae (28%), Sturnidae (13%), and Charadridae (8%). Seventy per cent of birds observed (n=7665) were classed as very common and 2% (n=261) as very rare. Species density (S/N = 3.39) and population density (n/N = 196) were at their maximum in December. Ecological indices on temporal base reveal high species richness and Simpson diversity (1/D =17.0 and 1-D= 0.942) in August and November and Shannon diversity was high (H’=3.275) in November during study period.

Playback-aided surveys and acoustic monitoring in the detection of the Endangered Forest OwletAthene blewitti

“…The first records of Forest Owlet from Dang were in 2014 (Patel et al 2015), and since then, they have been increasingly recorded from this region. Although Salim Ali’s landscape-wide bird surveys in 1954 (Ali 1954) covered the Dang, Forest Owlet was not detected here, and neither have ornithological studies in 1990 (Worah 1991) and 2000 (Trivedi 2006). It is unclear if these birds have recently moved into this landscape or if the recent targeted surveys with different methods have enhanced the detection of the species.…”

“…We collated three past datasets across which we based our resurveys. The earliest dataset was from 1988-1991(Worah 1991), denoted hereafter as Worah 1990 by the year of the survey; and a decade later, in 2000 (Trivedi 2006), hereafter Trivedi 2000; and the latest, almost two decades later in 2018-2019 by (Khan et al 2023) - hereafter Khan 2019. All study years are denoted by the year of surveys and not by the year of publication.…”

“…Although it may not be possible to answer this question comprehensively, we repurposed two previous datasets of surveys from 1990 (Worah 1991), 2000 (Trivedi 2006), and a recent occupancy survey in 2019 (Khan et al 2023) and re-surveyed these locations with traditional and acoustic-aided methods. We also examined differences in climate in the time intervening the surveys.…”

Avifaunal diversity in Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Campus, Assam, India

“…As this task involves mobile species, the line/strip transect survey method is preferred, in which the surveyor walks along the line and records the presence/absence of individual species. The line transect method has been widely implemented in many avian surveys (Surasinghe & Alwis 2010;Devi et al 2012;Kottawa-Arachchi & Gamage 2015;Chakdar et al 2016;Pragasan & Madesh 2018;Singh et al 2020;Trivedi & Vaghela 2020). Other attributes of this survey method, such as the number of individuals and their perpendicular distances from the line, are omitted here since the aim of the present survey does not include density and detectability parameters.…”

“…In the literature, there are many documented campus-based avian studies, but only as species checklists (Gupta et al 2009;Surasinghe & Alwis 2010;Ali et al 2013;Kabir et al 2017;Manohar et al 2017;Sailo et al 2019), without thorough and quantitative habitat-wise diversity analysis. On the other hand, Chakdar et al (2016) & Trivedi & Vaghela (2020) conducted a diversity & abundance analysis based on the dataset of species-wise number of individual birds. The overall trend suggests that most campus-based diversity analyses are checklists or abundance-based and are not based on a presence-absence dataset.…”