Aathira Perinchery

The Warli tribe, an indigenous community that lives in northwest Maharashtra, believes that the cat-god Waghoba will protect them from the negative impacts of sharing spaces with leopards.

Rooftop solar has significant potential in India but growth in the sector has lagged due to many factors including a focus on mega solar power projects. India has a target of achieving 40 gigawatts (GW) of green energy from the rooftop solar sector by 2022 but it has not been able to achieve even 20 percent from it so far.

A National Geographic photographer and a wildlife biologist embark on an unforgettable quest for the remote mountaintops of the Western Ghats.

Evolutionary ecologists keep finding new species in the Western Ghats. Here’s how it happens.

In spite of global warming and pollution, coral reefs in the Gulf of Mannar have been resilient – a sign that management interventions are helping.

The human costs of armed conflicts are well known. Now, a study has found that in the last three decades, such conflicts have been spread across habitats used by more than three-quarters of the world’s terrestrial birds and mammals as well.

Forest restoration is more well-known than grassland restoration, even though grasslands, just like forests, are important carbon sinks and crucial for carbon sequestration.

The Malayan giant squirrel is predominantly arboreal and lives in the tropical and subtropical montane evergreen and dry deciduous forests of Sikkim, north Bengal and northeast India. The species’ dependence on a contiguous tree canopy means that logging, habitat loss and forest fragmentation are common threats to the species across its range. Malayan giant squirrels are also often hunted for subsistence.

Marine debris such as abandoned nets, plastic fish traps, ropes and lines are becoming far more common on the coral reefs of the Gulf of Mannar, along the coast of southern Tamil Nadu. Though marine debris spans an area of only 1,150 square metres in the Gulf, it has an impact on coral health, making them more susceptible to injury, fragmentation, and disease. It also affects corals’ existing resilience to climate change, worry researchers.

Imagine sighting a wild carnivore as you go about your daily chores near your house. Your reactions may range from joy to awe, apprehension, or fear. Or even anger: maybe it had taken off with your prize hen some time back. So your response to the animal may depend on several factors, including your past interactions with it or the amount of risk you think it poses to you. These, at least, are some of the factors that play a role in how villagers respond to snow leopards and wolves in the Indian Himalaya.

Sloth bears in India are at the centre of several conservation challenges, especially in human-dominated areas.

The Anakkayam Small Hydro Electric Project, proposed in the Vazhachal-Sholayar forests of Thrissur district and close to the proposed Athirapilly dam, is a tail-race development project that aims to generate electricity from the water that flows out of the Sholayar dam. However, the 7.5 MW project has both greens and local tribal communities worried.

Several long-term ecological and environmental monitoring projects – that collect data systematically for extended periods – are being conducted in India. However, Covid-19 has disrupted many of them in several ways.

The Kalinga cricket frog, first spotted from the Eastern Ghats in 2018, has now been recorded in the Western Ghats as well. This extends the distributional range of the species. But it also puts the focus on the need for detailed surveys and rigorous science, say scientists.

Scientists discovered the Gollum snakehead just last year from the Western Ghats of Kerala. Now, they find that it is genetically distinct from other snakehead fish worldwide, and that it sports so many unique features that it warrants its very own family, ‘Aenigmachannidae.’ The team’s work also shows that new snakehead family has a rich evolutionary history.