State of India’s Birds 2023
A framework to leverage semi-structured citizen science for bird conservation
State of India’s Birds Partnership
Source: BirdLife International and Dogeatcog
State of Birds
- Regular status assessments of a region’s birds
State of Birds
- Regular status assessments of a region’s birds
- Limited to few parts of the world (Global North)
- Large-scale & long-term systematic monitoring programmes (structured data)
State of Birds
- Regular status assessments of a region’s birds
- Limited to few parts of the world (Global North)
- Large-scale & long-term systematic monitoring programmes (structured data)
Semi-structured data: useful, burgeoning resource
State of Birds
- Regular status assessments of a region’s birds
- Limited to few parts of the world (Global North)
- Large-scale systematic monitoring programmes (structured data)
Semi-structured data: useful, burgeoning resource despite analytical challenges and differences
Robinson et al. 2025, Ongole et al. 2026 preprint
Source: eBird/Cornell Lab of Ornithology
The SoIB Partnership
- Provide best current knowledge on status and conservation of India’s birds
- Curating, analysing, and synthesizing available information to bring out variety of knowledge products for use by policymakers, managers, researchers, conservationists, media, and other stakeholders
The SoIB Partnership
- Provide best current knowledge on status and conservation of India’s birds
- Curating, analysing, and synthesizing available information to bring out variety of knowledge products for use by policymakers, managers, researchers, conservationists, media, and other stakeholders
- Products freely available, and represent state-of-the-art knowledge on species, habitats, locations, and threats
Data-driven research & conservation policy
Developed a new methodological framework
- Data curation before modelling
- List length covariate: utilise historical data
- Spatial subsampling + nested random effects in GLMMs
- Strict sensitivity checks
- Three-way conservation priority classification
Results
(some of ’em)
Illustration: Saumitra Deshmukh
Open habitat birds, invertivores & raptors in global peril
Burns et al. 2020, Rigal et al. 2023, Shaw et al. 2024, Bharadwaj et al. 2024
Srinivasan et al. 2025, Datta et al. 2026 preprint, Bharadwaj et al. 2025
- Report is more than status & trends
- SoIB is more than the report
Illustration: Saumitra Deshmukh
Looking ahead
Looking ahead
SoIB 2027
Thank you!
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All SoIB illustrations here by Saumitra Deshmukh.
Slides made with ❤ and in Quarto.
Appendix
Birders’ checklists
Source: Aasheesh Pittie (L), P Jeganathan (R)
Historical data on eBird
Reporting frequency
Reducing bias
Migratory shorebirds
SoIB 2023 summary
Illustrations: Saumitra Deshmukh
The knowledge gap
- National + state-wise products & launches
- Engagement with state- and local-level stakeholders (FD training)
- IUCN Red List reassessment of 9 species
- National Red List
- Proactive partnership of organisations
SoIB 2027 sneak peek!
- Analytical improvements: subsampling, checklist centroids, hex-grids
- Data improvements: species attributes
- Data gaps: species, space, habitat, scale ?
- Conservation across space: habitats, protection, urbanisation
- Metrics for conservation: NRL, WPE, WLPA, Wild Bird Index ?
- Demography
- Deeper dives: threats & policy
- … and more!
Compute
Software Consultant
Non-profits must be able to use any and all compute capacity available
Source: Shree Kumar