Mysuru City Bird Atlas (2014–16): a systematic study of birds across space and time

The Mysuru City Bird Atlas is an ambitious volunteer project to map the birds of an entire city – the first systematic effort of its kind in India. Mysuru city was gridded into a set of square cells, and each cell was surveyed for birds in the winter and in the summer of 2014, 2015 and 2016. The goal of this effort was to assess the distribution and abundance of the birds of Mysuru such that the accumulated information can be used to assess seasonal changes in avifauna as well as to examine the relationship between birds and their habitat in an urban setting. In this article, we present selected outcomes, including maps as well as raw comparisons of abundance across the two seasons and the three years of the atlas surveys. Some of the results recapture broadly understood phenomena, such as long-distance migration resulting in seasonal differences in bird communities and species richness. Other results are suggestive of previously undescribed patterns, such as seasonal local movements. F...