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Network for Conserving Central India

Project Spotlight

Measuring the Efficacy of the NCCI – How We Might Move Forward with Our Goals in Central India

9/23/2021

 
~ By Satvik Parashar
​Conservation on a holistic level that maintains biodiversity as well as local livelihood requires collaborations across scientists, local people, decision-makers and practitioners. Such strategy engages NGOs, researchers and governments within what is called a Science, Policy and Practice Interface (SPPI). This calls for the involvement of a socio-ecological network that drives collaborations between trans-disciplinary organizations and measures the effectiveness of the knowledge gained through this collaboration, for multiple goals. Our network – the NCCI is one such network, and a recent paper by Amrita Neelakantan, Kishore Rithe, Gary Tabor and Ruth DeFries discusses the institutional context within which NCCI operates and indicators that could measure our work in the future.

The familiar Central Indian Highlands cover an area of more than 450000 sq. kms, spanning the states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The landscape consists of several Protected Areas (PAs) and Tiger Reserves (TRs), and is home to a variety of flora and fauna.
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Central Indian Highlands and protected areas landscapes. (a) India and location of the Central Indian Highlands (CIH)region across three states (Yellow and orange polygons depicting parts Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chhattisgarh (CH) and Maharashtra (MH) states) as well as PAs (green polygons). (b) Forest cover (dark green) in the region with embedded PAs (lighter green polygons) show corridors between the PAs

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Agroforestry as an avenue for enhanced livelihoods, lower ungulate-crop raiding and PES in central India

7/25/2021

 
~ by Satvik Parashar
 
Since the last few decades, biodiversity conservation measures in India have largely been dependent on the creation of state-controlled protected areas (PAs). Despite the popularity, PAs in India face many conservation challenges that include fragmentation, insufficient size, limited connectivity, development pressure, close proximity to human population etc. Additionally, there can be resentment among some local populations in these areas as they are seldom part of the decision making processes that directly affect them. Inclusive strategies such as ecotourism and biodiversity-friendly agriculture are proving to be more sustainable steps in conservation. A recent paper focuses on the effectiveness of voluntary conservation initiatives on private agricultural lands such as agroforestry. For the involvement of landowners in agroforestry, the influence of factors such as 1) Program Design, 2) Land Characteristics, Demographic and socio-economic characteristics of landowners, 3) Socio-psychological variables of landowners has been studied in this paper.
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Figure 1 :Program Factors and Landowner Characteristics that shape Landowner Preferences 

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Room to Roam in Central India

5/25/2020

 
~ by Archita Sharma (WWF-India)

The Central Indian Landscape has been a stronghold for several long-ranging wild mammals for several thousands of years. Its dense forests and rolling grasslands provide a rich holdout for tigers and several other carnivores, big and small, prowling, hunting, and stalking in the shadows of this wild heartland. But over the last century, Central India has lost a share of its forests to growing human settlements, railways, roads and rampant mining. So, a landscape that was once a contiguous expanse of dry deciduous forests is now fragmented, remaining with 34% forest cover, out of which only 8.5% is legally protected.

Long-ranging mammals need room to roam. In many mammalian carnivores, the juveniles move out of their mother's territory to establish their own, with the males moving long distances to find new territories. When their dispersal routes to seek out prey, territory and mates are severed by roads, cities, villages, mining, and railways, natural populations can be isolated into small island populations. These small isolated populations face a higher risk of disease and extinction. Population genetic structure can help us determine the isolation or connectivity in natural populations.

To put it simply, genetic structure captures the level of genetic variation existing in a population. If mammals from different forest patches are mating with each other, they will be genetically more similar and will consequently have a lower genetic structure. Similarly, isolated populations will be genetically more distinct and will have higher genetic structure. Using DNA as a tool, estimating structure and connectivity in mammals can help us understand fine scale impacts of fragmentation. While there are several such studies on tigers, very little is known about how fragmentation impacts other mammalian species.

A new study published in Diversity and Distribution answers how the same level of habitat fragmentation has differential impacts multiple mammalian species in the threatened Central Indian Landscape. Researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, investigated the genetic structure and connectivity in four long-ranging mammalian species — jungle cat, leopard, sloth bear, and tiger. The four species have varying body size, diet and dispersal abilities, and are expected to have species-specific responses to fragmentation. The two major objectives of the study were (1) to understand how the genetic structure is partitioned between these four species and (2) to find out how different landscape features like roads, built-up areas, and human density impact connectivity and dispersal in the study species.

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Leopards diets in the Kanha-Pench corridor: now and scenarios of the future

3/3/2020

 
~ by Amrita Neelakantan (coordinator NCCI)

Mahi Puri and colleagues have conducted extensive surveys to find out what leopards eat and how might leopard diets change in the future. The study focuses on the important corridor between Kanha and Pench national parks. Leopards live within and outside of forests, with some taking up residence in the agricultural matrix. Wildlife outside the bounds of protected areas interact much more often with humans over a range of human activities – grazing cattle, growing crops and collecting non-timber forest produce to name a few. Understanding how our human lives affect and in turn change the behavior of wild species is important for a future where humans and big cats might continue to live side by side in one of the world’s more populated places that remains vital for global wildlife conservation goals. In addition, the knowledge of benefits provided by carnivore presence can help offset the negative perceptions around these species. Mahi Puri and her team extensively surveyed forest and households across the corridor to make sense of drivers of leopard distribution, conflict, and current patterns of their diet to showcase what might change in the future.
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The big takeaway from this paper is that within the surveyed sites leopards predominantly ate wild prey (langur and ungulates) – an important consideration for human-wildlife conflict in the region. Occupancy statistics also highlight that leopards are more likely to be in spots with ample wild-prey confirming that leopards still prefer wild-prey and are not preferentially moving into human dominated areas for non-wild prey (signified by cattle and dog icons in the figures).
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Dispersal routes of tigers and other wildlife species in the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve

7/14/2019

 
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The buffer zones, created around the protected areas, acts not only as the insulator and keep away the anthropogenic pressures of local communities from the core zone or ‘critical habitat’ but also provide the habitat to the spill over tigers and other wildlife species from core zones.

The wild animals disperse from their core breeding areas to buffer areas or to further in
corridor areas to establish their territory or to move to other protected areas. Therefore
​buffer zones play important role in long-term conservation of animals. The information on dispersal routes, status of wildlife and their habitat in buffer zone is crucial to tailor the management strategies for buffer areas. Therefore a 2-year study in buffer zone of the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve was initiated by The Corbett Foundation to study the dispersal routes of tigers and other wildlife species. Click here for the full report.

The findings of the study indicated that tigers and leopards not only using the buffer zone for dispersal but also establishing their territories in buffer zone. The study recorded 29 mammalian species out of 35 listed species in Bandhavgarh. Asiatic wildcat (Felis silvestris ornata) and smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) were recorded for the first time in Bandhavgarh during this study.


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