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Ruling the Roost: Avian Species Reclaim Urban Habitat During India’s COVID Lockdown

View ORCID ProfileRaahil Madhok, View ORCID ProfileSumeet Gulati
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.422890
Raahil Madhok
1Wildlife and Conservation Economics Lab, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of British Columbia
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Sumeet Gulati
1Wildlife and Conservation Economics Lab, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of British Columbia
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  • For correspondence: sumeet.gulati@ubc.ca
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Abstract

As we retreated to our dwellings in the “anthropause” of spring 2020, did other species return to our urban centres? We leverage an increase in balcony birdwatching, a million eBird entries, and difference-in-difference techniques to test if avian species richness rose during India’s COVID lockdown. We find that birdwatchers in India’s 20 most populous cities observed 8-17% more species during the lockdown. Most additional observations occurred after a two-week lag, signaling greater abundance instead of improved detection. More frequent appearances of at-risk, rare, and common species were recorded, implying that making our cities more wildlife friendly can protect threatened species in addition to urban specialists. Our contributions are: 1) to isolate and estimate a causal impact of reducing human activity on avian diversity, 2) to improve the external validity of this literature in rapidly urbanizing bio-diverse developing countries, and, 3) to illustrate a method separating abundance from detection in observational avian surveys.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • ↵* Email: madhokr{at}mail.ubc.ca

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted December 16, 2020.
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Ruling the Roost: Avian Species Reclaim Urban Habitat During India’s COVID Lockdown
Raahil Madhok, Sumeet Gulati
bioRxiv 2020.12.15.422890; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.422890
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Ruling the Roost: Avian Species Reclaim Urban Habitat During India’s COVID Lockdown
Raahil Madhok, Sumeet Gulati
bioRxiv 2020.12.15.422890; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.422890

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