Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA)

• The Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA) is a first-of-its-kind state level birds atlas in India and was inspired by the Mysore Bird Atlas.
• The entire state of Kerala was divided into grids and was systematically surveyed twice a year, during the wet (July - September) and dry (January - March) seasons.
• The surveys for the KBA were constructed during 2015 to 2020 and it it the Asia's largest bird atlas in terms of geographical extent, sampling effort and the species coverage.
• KBA accounted 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.

Data Set

• The data is made available in the R object format, ie in .rds format.
• Saving data into R data formats can reduce the size of large files by considerably.
• In order to read the .rds files in Python we can use pyreadr package, which can be easily installable using pip install pyreadr.

Getting Started

Requirements :

• Python veriosn used : Python 3.9.12
• Python packages

pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade

Example : Reading .rds files.

!pip install pyreadr

import pyreadr

result = pyreadr.read_r('../path_to_file.rds') # also works for RData
print(f"Class type of 'result' \t:: {type(result)}")

df = result[None] # extract the pandas data frame
print(f"Class type of 'df' \t:: {type(df)}")

>>> Class type of 'result' 	:: <class 'collections.OrderedDict'>
>>> Class type of 'df' 	    :: <class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>

Refernce & Credits

• Bird Count India
• The Hindu : Kerala gets its first ever scientific bird atlas
• Times of India : Mammoth survey for Kerala Bird Atlas ends
• Mysore Bird Atlas
• Images : Saketh Upadhya

License

The license can be found in the LICENSE file.