Species Assemblage of Birds’ Community in Protected Areas of Delhi-NCR

Green spaces in cities especially in the capital city of India provide necessary recreational, social and psychological benets to stressing residents of the city. Cities and towns depict the extreme human-modied environments with only remnants of the original habitats present. Study undertaken to know the abundance, diversity and species richness of avian fauna in urban protected landscapes of Delhi, NCR. In the following paper, the methods include data is extracted from e-Bird of past 40 years to illustrate the changing trend of bird species from 1980-2019 from 7 greenspaces of Delhi-NCR which are Aravalli Biodiversity Park, Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, Deer Park, Dheerpur Wetland, National Zoological Park, Northern Ridge, Okhla Bird Sanctuary, Sanjay Van, Yamuna Biodiversity Park and analysed as box plots using PAST. The result showed a varied trend from 1980-2019, which included the usage of e-Bird by the period. The result indicated that the recent decade is well updated with data on e-Bird, hence several birds’ individual is maximumly observed from 2011-2019. The study has shown the wavy trend from 1980-2019 in species composition in the capital city of India. This also suggest that people have started recording observation on a single platform and shown interest in last decade. This study will lead to taking the necessary step to maintain the avian biodiversity in the green spaces of the capital city- Delhi-NCR.


Introduction
Green spaces in urban areas include urban parks, remnants of natural forested areas, streetscape plantations that act as important conservation areas in the urban setting. Green spaces in urban areas comprise largely small and large neighbourhood parks, pocket gardens in residential colonies, green enclaves in public institutional grounds, avenue trees, urban forests, cemeteries and vacant lots. Parks and gardens are the major publicly usable land safeguarding urban green spaces and they are maintained primarily for the recreation of urban inhabitants (Schipperijn et al. 2010;Paul 2016). Urban green spaces can increase resilience and reduce vulnerabilities to urbanization. Vegetation in urban areas contributes positively towards ecological heath in an urban system (Paul and Nagendra 2017). Green spaces in urban areas provide ecosystem services and recreational venues for diverse users. Moreover, urban green spaces provide various ecosystem services including social, economic and ecological bene ts such as regulation of micro-climatic conditions, carbon sequestration, recreational and spiritual value and so on along with habitat for urban wildlife and platform for conservation easements and community development potential (Miller 1997;Hague and Siegel 2002;Milton 2002;Khera et al. 2009).
Urbanisation is the development and involvement of human activities; urbanisation is an alteration of the environment according to human needs which negatively affect the native biota. Aves are considered to be the potential umbrella group of species for biodiversity conservation. However, these days the research on avian biodiversity depicts the effects of urbanisation on the bird communities and in many other facets of biodiversity conservation. Urbanisation is one of the most prominent phenomena and its negative effect on biodiversity especially in the term of habitat fragmentation and loss (Rajashekara and Venkatesha 2015). The changes in land use such as agricultural development and urbanisation have harmed the environment and its components by varied processes. These processes include degradation, fragmentation and loss of habitat, alteration of disturbance regimes and introduction of native and nonnative species (La Sorte et al. 2014). Due to the increase in human population continuing to grow in density and extent (UN 2011) and the effect of anthropogenic activities the viability of many species is likely to reduce. As birds are considered to be excellent bioindicators, their communities attract several species, these are ideal for avifaunal studies which are mentioned later in the paper (Tippetts 2018). Birds have a signi cant role in the functioning and balancing of ecosystems. Avian Fauna is also considered as an agent of nutrient cycle, plant gene ow through pollination, seed dispersal and helps in environmental sanitation through scavenging of carrion. Aves are also used as food resources, artistic and spiritual inspiration by many folks (Kiros et al. 2018).
The national capital of India has undergone rapid urbanisation in the last few decades. It is also seen that with proper city planning green spaces and streetscapes of the city has increased (Khera et al. 2009).
The current study was carried out to research the status of biodiversity in protected areas and recreational parks of Delhi-NCR by extracting data from the citizen science platform-"e-Bird" of the last 40 years i.e., from 1980-2019.

Study Area
The geophysical area of Delhi is 1,483 sq. km and located at 28.7041° N, 77.1025° E, also showcasing two signi cant features i.e., Yamuna oodplains and Delhi Ridge. Delhi is known to be the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest metropolis in terms of the population of the country. According to the census 2011, the population of the capital city has reached 1.67 Crores, the wherein urban population is 97.50% and rural population is 2.50% (http://forest.delhigovt.nic.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_forest/Forest/Home/Delhi+State).
The climate of Delhi is quite varying from extremely hot to chill. The capital becomes extremely hot in June and July followed by the monsoon. The annual temperature in Delhi varies from 3 degrees to 45 degrees Celsius and the precipitation is between 400mm to 600mm (http://forest.delhigovt.nic.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_forest/Forest/Home/Delhi+State).

Methods
Data were extracted from the e-Bird from 1980-2019. There are various locations within Delhi from where the complete checklist has been updated by the enthusiastic birders (http://cornelllanofornithology.github.io/e-Bird-best-practices/e-Bird.html). There are 480 birding areas used by birders out of which 18 are listed (Table 1), according to the e-Bird checklist. To carry out this temporal analysis a simple procedure has been followed. The literature is searched using publish and perish. Later the data collection was done using e-Bird and extracted in Microsoft Excel, use of pivot

Results
Urbanisation has altered richness, evenness and diversity composition in the region through it showed almost the same throughout the decade but there were a lot of alterations and changes seen in the region due to urbanisation. Data analysis of rst quarter of year i.e., January to April has been analysed and following are the results. Bird species data was collected from e-bird from 1980-2019 in different protected areas and recreational parks. In 1980, the total number bird species were observed more, and gradually the bird species were decreased, but in 1988, we observed more bird species after onwards, the bird species were drastically decreased. Since 2011 to 2019, the highest number of the bird species was observed.
In Fig. 1 the highest number (66367)  The lease number (180) of bird species were observed in 1997-2003 in the targeted study area (Fig. 1).
The percentage of birds was observed in each 5 years of time interval (Fig. 2). The 91.32% of birds were observed in during 2015-2019 time period, followed by 5.70%, 1.21%, 0.59%, 0.57%, 0.37%, and 0.25% of birds in 2010-2014, 1986-1990, 2004-2009, 1980-1985, 1991-1996, and 1997-2003 time periods respectively (Fig. 2). The boxplot showed the individual bird species, observed in the study area in each year (Fig. 3). The individual bird species were drastically increased in the year of 2014 to 2019 in the study area, but in the rest of the years there is no drastic change in the number of individual bird species (Fig. 3).
In Fig. 4 showed the individual bird species were high in the 2015-2019 time period compared to other time periods in the targeted study area. In Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary (ABWS), the highest number (26362) of birds was observed, whereas the lower number (213) of birds was observed in Dheerpur Wetland (DW) (Fig. 5). In Fig. 6 showed the individual bird species in each protected area. Aravalli Biodiversity Park (ABP) was observed highest individual bird species, followed by Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary (ABWS) respectively whereas remaining protected areas showed very low number of individual bird species (Fig. 6). In the supplementary le, all the collected data on bird species from e-Bird was provided.

Conservation & monitoring
The intense and human activities creating pressure around the metropolitan landscapes which have made a negative impression on the avian community composition of urbanisation (Rajashekara and Venkatesha 2015). Conserving vegetation in the urban areas supports bird species to dwell in urban regions. As technology has increased and the awareness of keeping and maintaining the e-Bird checklist and this also helped the scientist and research to easily approach the data of a certain region and less manual power and expenses. Complexity and the nature of habitats and microhabitats constitute a valuable factor that determines the species composition and diversity in a particular area. Thereby several bird species tend to nd their own suitable habitats where they have access and resources to feed and breed (Begon et al. 1986). Highly complex habitats provide a wide array of opportunities to a higher number of bird species as they are enriched with a wide range of foods and other resources to sustain lives. This parameter governs the variation of avifaunal species composition and diversity in large scale.
Parameters such as abundance and relative abundance of bird species might be associated with nature of habitat, abundance of food, and breeding season of the species (Bellanthudawa et al. 2019).
According to Sethy et al. (2015) assessment of the bird community is a necessary tool in biodiversity conservation and identi cations of conservation actions. Gaining/ having knowledge on diversity and composition of bird communities is also important to determine the health status of the local ecosystem or regional landscapes. Moreover, identifying the existing threats in a particular area is also essential for developing effective conservation efforts and management actions.
Birds are a group of faunal species that are greatly in uenced by human attention. Therefore, there are some incidences which lead to reduction in insectivorous birds and total birds' richness as a result of anthropogenic disturbances. In more human-modi ed urban land uses, less development-sensitive bird species can be seen while there are larger numbers of individuals of birds in recreational trails in forest and grassland ecosystems. Reduction and control of human-modi ed urban land uses in a greener area will facilitate habitat for sensitive species for rapid development activities with large scale disturbances.
When constructions and developments are taken place, vegetation and plants are cleared and removed from the sites which creates canopy gaps. This narrows down and separates habitat connectivity of habitats, making more sensitive species vulnerable and decreasing their population size. Conservation and management efforts should be oriented toward protecting habitat and resources for development sensitive species, such as migrants, insectivores, and forest specialists, during the modi cation of available land uses. Most birds residing in these areas are vulnerable to habitat degradation due to loopholes in existing legal protection. In addition, community knowledge enhancements also should be strengthened for a sustainable conservation of bird species while maintaining their ecological interactions in urban areas.

Conclusion
The results extracted from greenspaces of urban areas like Delhi, species composition has uctuated over the years. However, the maximum number of observations were recorded from past decade. This is due to the reason that birders have gradually increased their interest in avian fauna and maintaining the record on e-Bird to help other people and scientists and researchers to carry out their work.