Forging Linkages Across Regions for the Wide-ranging Asian Elephant

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Connectivity across habitats and animal populations is critical to conservation. Connectivity is forged by animal movements – or dispersal – across large heterogeneous landscapes. Connectivity boosts the ability of animals to persist over time, and enhances both immunity and adaptability of animal populations, and helps prevent local extinctions. When local extinctions do occur, connectivity allows animals to recolonise previously occupied but currently empty or depauperate habitats.

Today, habitats are sometimes severely fragmented, and human presence has drastically restricted animal movement. … Read More

How Communities are Evolving to Deal with Human-Elephant Conflict in Northern Chhattisgarh

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The Northern Chhattisgarh landscape is located at the intersection of the Eastern Baghelkhand plateau and the Chhattisgarh plains. The region is drained by the Mahanadi and Son rivers. Geologically, it is composed of lower Gondwana and the eastern extension of the Deccan Peninsula. It is surrounded by the Chhota Nagpur and Hazaribaug plateaus, which are rich in coal deposits. Over this buried ‘black gold’ stand the tropical dry deciduous and mixed forests inhabited by a wide variety of wildlife, including … Read More

Living with Elephants in the Anaimalais (Elephant Hills)

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In the foothills of the Anaimalai Tiger Reserve (ATR) in Tamil Nadu, a couple of ‘mango showers’ mark the end of summer and herald the beginning of the monsoon. At this time, the private farmlands that adjoin the Tiger Reserve in the small village of Sethumadai are leased out by their owners to the local villagers – temporary tenant farmers, who work as daily laborers during the rest of the year. They plough the leased farmlands and sow the most … Read More

Building Bridges – Improving Forest Connectivity in the Western Ghats

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A young tusker walks along Aala Halla in Lokkere reserve forest (RF), an important migratory corridor connecting two parts of Bandipur Tiger Reserve. Ecological restoration in this landscape over the last 12-years involving Junglescapes (an NGO specialising in ecological restoration) has created a very healthy habitat for elephants, with excellent grass cover and numerous browsing trees / shrub species. The area has been made almost completely free of the exotic invasive Lantana camara. Usage of the habitat by elephants … Read More

Inviolate Spaces Act as Refugia for Conflict Prone Asiatic Elephant

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Authors Varun R. Goswami, Divya Vasudev and Madan K. Oli use population modeling to demonstrate the detrimental effects of mortality resulting from human–wildlife conflict on long-term persistence of the endangered Asian elephant. Below are the highlights of their study, “The importance of conflict-induced mortality for conservation planning in areas of human–elephant co-occurrence” published in Biological Conservation (Volume 176) in 2014.

A long-standing debate in wildlife conservation is whether we need inviolate spaces, or spaces devoid of human presence, for long-term … Read More

Bannerghatta National Park In Grave Danger — Act Now!

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New 2018 Notification Further Reduces Bannerghatta ESZ. 

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has released a new draft notification seeking to reduce the proposed Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ) around Bannerghatta National Park by a further 100 sq. km. This would reduce the zone to just 1km from the park’s boundary, and a mere 100m in some places. 

Read / download the new 2018 draft MoEFCC notification here.

Bannerghatta National Park is part of a contiguous wildlife habitat … Read More

Manual Review — ‘Monitoring Elephant Populations and Assessing Threats’ (edited by Simon Hedges)

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Monitoring Elephants the right way: A Synopsis of the Manual titled ‘Monitoring Elephant Populations and Assessing Threats’.

Elephants are social, group living mammals revered by people across diverse cultures in the world. Once widely distributed across a range of ecological conditions, currently distribution and abundance of elephants have both dwindled drastically throughout its range due to habitat loss, fragmentation and poaching. India holds the largest population of Asian elephants surviving today.

In spite of its conservation significance, elephant populations across … Read More

India Proposes New Strategies to Conserve Elephants

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This was published in Oryx, February 2011.

India is home to a population of c. 26,000 Asian elephant Elephas maximus over an area of c. 110,000 km2. Currently 65,000 km2 of this area is declared as 32 Elephant Reserves across Protected Areas (30%), Reserved Forests (40%) and private lands (30%). Securing this landscape for the elephant is a challenging task in a country that has an expanding economy and over a billion people competing for space, some of it with … Read More