Presence points and behavioral data of Sarus Crane in Lumbini-Nepal September and October 2014

Abstract

This dataset presents geo-referenced summaries of Sarus Crane (Grus antigone) and their behavioral sightings from field work. The Lumbini region is the hot spot with more than 250 species of birds and included as an Important Bird Area (IBA) of Nepal. It comprises beautiful cultural and religious resources. Hence, it is under the World Heritage Site of UNESCO. The occurrence of Sarus Crane in this region has religious value related with Buddhism. The 'presence only' data of Sarus Crane are provided for low land Nepal covering most of the VDCs of Rupandehi and Kapilbastu districts. The bounding box (decimal degrees) of the data coverage is 27.30015 til 27.576548 latitude (North) and 83.36193 til 82.990292 longitude (East), and an altitude covering 72m til 111m above sea level. Eight human resources including two experts and six local observers compiled the field-based data. The data consist of an MS Excel which includes 19 rows and 74 columns with the the following column headings: Time, Day, Month and Year of sightings, Observers, Latitude, Longitude and Elevation (m) of the sighting points, Geo-referencing method, Geographic datum, Location, District, Country, Male, Female, ClusterTotal, Habitat, Behaviour and Remarks. While this data set is relatively small, it reflects a large and complex set of representative information for the entire lowland of Nepal. Altogether 201 Sarus Cranes individuals weer counted including 104 male and 97 female within three habitats and four behaviours of birds are also described in the data. Naturalists, bird watchers, modelers as well as investigators of cranes and other birds in the region of Nepal and Northern India will find good value in this data set.