NCCI members highlighted the great work on restoration of the production and conservation landscapes at the 4th Central Indian Landscape Symposium. The above map highlights the sites from our 4 presentations.

To know more - click on the mouseover links on the map and check out the presentations over here.

If you are part of or know of a case study in Central India on restoration please do get in touch with us! We are collating all restoration efforts in the region to understand what approaches are being piloted and even more exciting which approaches are showing signs of success - for people and wildlife to thrive in Central India.

Want to watch the recorded session and deep panel discussion after? Click here to check out our YouTube channel!

~ by Aditi Patil

Rapidly growing road networks contribute to a country’s social and economic development, but this contribution comes at a high price that is paid by wildlife. Roads cutting through wild habitat adversely affect animals, with one of the most distinct impacts being Animal-Vehicle Collisions (AVCs). A recent study conducted by researchers at Dr. Bilal Habib's lab at the Wildlife Institute of India examined factors like animal behavior and traffic characteristics that influence AVCs, and how information about these factors can be used to prevent such accidents.

​Increased connectivity through roads is critical for development. However, it increases construction of transport infrastructure, often passing through wild habitat. This poses a risk to wildlife. Animals attempting to cross roads often end up in collisions with vehicles. Notably, there are no natural factors of selection governing AVCs, meaning that these accidents occur entirely by chance. Both healthy and unhealthy individuals in animal populations are equally exposed to the risk. This non selective mortality can negatively affect a population through a loss of healthy individuals. Animals may deliberately begin to avoid crossing roads due to AVCs, thus leading to a barrier to movement. Such barriers will result in isolation of animal populations, and in some cases may even lead to the local extinction of species.

​~ by Prameek Kannan 

The paper explores the legal system of indigenous, forest dependent, tribal communities in Central India, and the multiple factors that influence its production. Forest dependent communities are not only an integral part of their ecosystems, but are a crucial ally for conservation initiatives as well. There have been few studies on the legal systems of indigenous tribes in India; this study looks to understand the same using a post-humanism approach. Posthumanism is a philosophy that considers humans in relation to ecology and technology, as opposed to in isolation, and therefore is an appropriate lens with which to view the environmental entities that influence tribal law in these communities. Here, the author looks to look at the role played by non-human entities in the production of the legal systems of these tribes.

​Two conservation priority landscapes in India - the Western Ghats and Central India remain major strongholds for several endemic and threatened species. However, urbanization and land conversion have resulted in wide-scale habitat fragmentation in both the landscapes. Fragmentation can alter how animals move across a landscape.

Wide-ranging mammals are particularly affected because they travel long distances to forage, breed, and find new territories. ​Identifying where and how have the mammalian movements been impacted at large regional scales will be critical in ensuring habitat connectivity and preventing local extinctions.

A new study published in Biological Conservation evaluated landscape-wide permeability to the movement of five endangered and vulnerable mammals - Asian Elephant, Gaur, Leopard, Sambar, and Sloth Bear in these two priority landscapes. The expansive study area covered 120,000 km2 of the Western Ghats and 729,000 km2 of the Central Indian region. For each of the five study species, the researchers modelled movement in the presence and absence of landscape features such as land-use land-cover, infrastructure and human population. They generated spatially explicit maps identifying areas where animal movement is impeded, reduced, unrestricted, increased, and channeled. These categories can be interpreted as follows – movement is impeded and reduced due to underlying high resistance landscape features, unrestricted due to underlying low resistance areas, finally increased and channeled due to high resistance surrounding landscape features.