37% bird species use Delhi ponds as winter habitat: Researchers

BY VISHAL GULATI

New Delhi, June 21 Despite ponds being less than 0.5 per cent of Delhi's area, they are still being used by 37 per cent of bird species, both local and migratory, as winter habitat in the mega city, researchers said on Monday.

This makes Delhi's ponds the most bio-diverse of any urban ponds anywhere in the world, as best as they can make out.

The researchers, Prakhar Rawal, Swati Kittur, Murali Krishna Chatakonda and K.S. Gopi Sundar, discover that conditions at ponds have been extremely diverse.

Some have been extremely polluted with dumps of garbage, while others are wonderful healthy wetlands. Yet others are 'beautified' to allow easy access to people in the city as walking spaces.

This is the first time anyone has ever carefully and robustly documented the state of ponds at the scale of an entire mega city.

The researchers have nothing to compare their findings of the pond quality with other studies and hope that there will be studies in other mega cities to understand if Delhi's ponds are good, bad, or ugly.

The ponds

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