Dumdum airport: A necessity and luxury for human lifestyle but amenace for avian diversity

Abstract

Pollution has always been one of the major outcome of human activities to improve their lifestyle. This often results in imbalance in the ecosystem of biological species which makes their survival questionable. Kolkata airport area, i.e., Dum Dum airport, has become a zone of extreme noise and air pollution due to tremendous increase in traffic on roads and as well as flights, which has affected the survivality and diversity of many faunal species specially birds. Birds serve as a biological indicator of pollution and therefore were the subject of this study. The effect of noise and air pollution on relative abundance and richness of birds in the highly polluted area of connecting road of 1no. airport gate have been compared to two other areas, a non-polluted zone, Khalisha Kota Palli area and another area of intermediate pollution, Dum Dum Motijheel area; belonging to the same bio-geographic zone, by analyzing the diversity indices. The status of number of tress, natural resources available, rate of traffic were evaluated and compared in the course of our study. Results revealed that with the advent of traffic, there was an abrupt decrease in the species diversity and population density of birds in the airport area in spite of abundant number of trees present. The effect of pollution in bird richness and abundance status were determined by comparing the data of the highly polluted and intermediate polluted area with that of the non-polluted area using Student's t-test which proved to be highly significant.