River birds as potential indicators of local- and catchment-scale influences on Himalayan river ecosystems

This is where the project started. Rivers respond to what happens across their whole catchment — land use, channel modification, floodplain and riparian change — and those effects propagate downstream. If a group of birds is closely tied to river conditions, then the birds themselves might tell us something about the river that a water sample cannot.

We tested the idea along one of the major headwaters of the Ganges, using two years of survey data and multivariate analysis to relate the distribution of river birds to channel character, bank morphology, flow and land use.

The pattern was clear: riverine specialists were associated with the least modified reaches — faster flows, exposed bedrock, banks of pebble and boulder, and more intact riverine forest. Generalists were not, or not in the same way.

That makes specialist river birds credible, low-cost indicators of human impact on Himalayan rivers. It also sets the caveat that has shaped everything since: natural variation and human influence are entangled in these landscapes, and separating them needs more survey years, more rigorous estimation, and a better understanding of what each species actually needs. Those are the questions the later papers took up.

Read it in plain words: what we found on the river birds page.

Recommended citation: Sinha, A., Chatterjee, N., Ormerod, S. J., Adhikari, B. S., & Krishnamurthy, R. (2019). "River birds as potential indicators of local- and catchment-scale influences on Himalayan river ecosystems." Ecosystems and People, 15(1), 90–101.
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