Title: Impact of anthropogenic disturbances on the avifaunal community in a protected area of central India

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate the effects of anthropogenic pressure on the avian community in the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve. The Achanakmar Tiger reserve has reported 246 avian species (Chandra et. al. 2018). The Tiger Reserve is part of the Achanakmar-Amarkantak Biosphere Reserve the only interstate biosphere reserve in Central India, located in an ecologically diverse and least disturbed landscape representing Tropical Dry and Moist Deciduous forests on Deccan Peninsular biogeographic region of the country, covering the states of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh (Roychoudhury et al., 2016).The Achanakmar Tiger reserve has been declared as an Important Bird Area for better monitoring and conservation by Birdlife International. Line transects of 0.5 to 1.0 km were systematically laid out and a minimum distance of ~300 m between transects was established to avoid double counting (Bibby et al. 1998). Different disturbance variables were measured viz. Sound pressure, Human settlement and Human trails along with Impact matrices. There was no significant difference in the avian species richness and abundance between disturbed and undisturbed sites. But the community composition of birds in forests was distinct from that in the disturbed areas as those areas were dominated by only a few species. Thus, our study indicates that anthropogenic pressure can have a significant impact upon bird diversity and species composition in forests. For a healthy avian community conservation of forests with continuous canopy cover should be prioritized and more ecological research is needed to improve the knowledge on the effects of such disturbance on the avian community.