'Wherever there is land use change, sparrows are vanishing'
4
Once an integral part of our landscape, the number of sparrows in our midst has seen a sharp fall recently. Karthik K , a 26-year-old student at Delhi's TERI University, is project coordinator of Citizen Sparrow — an online project inviting people across India to report the presence or absence of sparrows in their locations. The project, funded by the ministry of environment and forests, has 29 collaborators, foremost being the Bombay Natural History Society. Its data aims at furthering research on India's sparrow populations. With over 9,000 online entries from 7,300 locations since the project took off in April, Karthik spoke withKim Arora on 'citizen science' projects — and initial reasons why our sparrows might be flying away:
What do you think is causing a decline in sparrow numbers today?
My initial field study data from Bangalore statistically proves that areas with a clustering of houses have more sparrows. This is a clue that probably with modern architecture, nesting space is an issue. Wherever there is land use change, sparrows are vanishing — though this is yet to be proved.
There are a couple of hypotheses from European studies as well. One is the effect of pesticides. Sparrow chicks need a high-protein diet, so they eat a lot of insects. The adult ones need a diet high on carbs, so they go for grains. Pesticides have an obvious negative effect. The second is the use of unleaded petrol. Methyl tert-butyl ether in petrol has a negative effect on insect populations too. So it's postulated this might have had a negative impact on the sparrow population.
At what stage is the Citizen Sparrow project?
Right now, we're still collating data, we haven't analysed it. We have to sort through the useful data and discard the non-useful. The first thing to do before we start analysing would be to look at conflicting reports from the same area. Then we'll ask one of the collaborating organisations from that particular city to check the discrepancies.
How do you account for repeat sightings in a data-collection model like this?
We're not really talking about population as such here but a distribution of population. The questionnaire contri-butors are required to fill in is designed in a way that we may get qualitative results. For quantitative results, the sample size has to be very robust.
How have you covered rural areas too?
In rural areas, people are much more conscious about their environmenta¦but we have put up printable versions of the form for contributors online, so that people can go out and get interviews from areas around them. We have also requested our collaborating organisations to do the same.
How did you get the idea of sourcing information straight from the public for this?
These kinds of 'citizen science' projects are very common in western countries. Two such projects have been big hits in India before this. One is Migrant Watch which had people keeping records of migratory birds. Besides this, there's the Jackal Project headed by the Nature Conservation Foundation. I got guidance from people who had run these projects before.
While we await your exact results, please tell us how sparrows are faring in other parts of the world?
Sparrows originated from Europea¦from 1977-2000 in Britain, there was a decline of 65% in the sparrow population. In the UK, if any bird species declines by 50% in a time period like this, it is considered threatened. In the US though, they're found in huge numbers and are even considered an agricultural pest.
What do you think is causing a decline in sparrow numbers today?
My initial field study data from Bangalore statistically proves that areas with a clustering of houses have more sparrows. This is a clue that probably with modern architecture, nesting space is an issue. Wherever there is land use change, sparrows are vanishing — though this is yet to be proved.
There are a couple of hypotheses from European studies as well. One is the effect of pesticides. Sparrow chicks need a high-protein diet, so they eat a lot of insects. The adult ones need a diet high on carbs, so they go for grains. Pesticides have an obvious negative effect. The second is the use of unleaded petrol. Methyl tert-butyl ether in petrol has a negative effect on insect populations too. So it's postulated this might have had a negative impact on the sparrow population.
At what stage is the Citizen Sparrow project?
Right now, we're still collating data, we haven't analysed it. We have to sort through the useful data and discard the non-useful. The first thing to do before we start analysing would be to look at conflicting reports from the same area. Then we'll ask one of the collaborating organisations from that particular city to check the discrepancies.
How do you account for repeat sightings in a data-collection model like this?
We're not really talking about population as such here but a distribution of population. The questionnaire contri-butors are required to fill in is designed in a way that we may get qualitative results. For quantitative results, the sample size has to be very robust.
How have you covered rural areas too?
In rural areas, people are much more conscious about their environmenta¦but we have put up printable versions of the form for contributors online, so that people can go out and get interviews from areas around them. We have also requested our collaborating organisations to do the same.
How did you get the idea of sourcing information straight from the public for this?
These kinds of 'citizen science' projects are very common in western countries. Two such projects have been big hits in India before this. One is Migrant Watch which had people keeping records of migratory birds. Besides this, there's the Jackal Project headed by the Nature Conservation Foundation. I got guidance from people who had run these projects before.
While we await your exact results, please tell us how sparrows are faring in other parts of the world?
Sparrows originated from Europea¦from 1977-2000 in Britain, there was a decline of 65% in the sparrow population. In the UK, if any bird species declines by 50% in a time period like this, it is considered threatened. In the US though, they're found in huge numbers and are even considered an agricultural pest.
No comments:
Post a Comment