Worldwide, common and widespread species are declining; in India, lack of information has meant that conservation attention has been focussed on only a few species (usually large, charismatic and threatened). Powered by citizen science, the State of India’s Birds report was created to fill this gap by assessing the conservation status of the majority of species that regularly occur in the country.

After a gap of three years, the second edition of the report (SoIB 2023) extends and updates the assessments presented in SoIB 2020, based on several refinements in analytical methodology as well as a much larger information base---with a mammoth 30 million field observations uploaded to the eBird platform from over 30,000 birdwatchers spanning across the country, which includes four additional years of data than in SoIB 2020, amounting to 20 million additional data points. This enabled evaluation of the distribution range size of 942 Indian birds (867 in 2020), and their trends in abundance both in the long term (over 25+ years) and currently (since 2015). Using these three measures, plus information from the IUCN Red List of global threat status, this report places Indian species into Low, Moderate and High categories of Conservation Priority for India. In addition, SoIB 2023 has introduced new sections in the report to emphasise the importance of systematic monitoring of birds as well as the various threats to birds in India.

All the code associated with the main SoIB report analyses are open source and available in this repo. In addition to this, there are other repositories for auxiliary analyses or offshoot projects using the comprehensive SoIB dataset of abundance trends and range sizes of Indian birds.

SoIB is a partnership of the following governmental and non-governmental organisations:

• Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE)
• Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS)
• Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (CES, IISc)
• Foundation for Ecological Security (FES)
• National Biodiversity Authority (NBA)
• National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCBS-TIFR)
• Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF)
• Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History ( SACON)
• Wetlands International—South Asia (WI-SA)
• Wildlife Institute of India (WII)
• Wildlife Trust of India (WTI)
• Worldwide Fund for Nature–India (WWF–India)
• Zoological Survey of India (ZSI)