More than two decades since he began unraveling secrets of the tropical savannahs – open grasslands with scattered trees – field ecologist Mahesh Sankaran continues to be fascinated with these…
Protection, restoration and better management of ecosystems through Nature-based Solutions (NbS) feature in many national commitments, including India's, but there is scope for much more in climate change mitigation and…
Thirty-one-year-old Nagarathna gingerly maneuvers a trolley-like contraption across the dairy shed with solar panel fixtures gleaming in the sun. The contraption – a solar-powered milking machine – saves Nagarathna, a…
Data on fatalities and damage associated with India’s flooding events from 1985 to 2016 have been meticulously mined from printed government records and combined with information from global databases to…
In the village of Nongtraw in Meghalaya, one of the world's wettest region, honey is quite sought after by the Khasi indigenous community who go to the forest to collect…
India’s draft mechanism to report on compliance to social and environmental safeguards to mitigate potential risks from implementing the UN's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation program (REDD+), a vital…
Tropical storms, in the last 21 years, have had an overall positive impact on the ability of mangroves in India to fix carbon dioxide, a key climate-warming greenhouse gas, says…
Believed to have been introduced by the British in pre-Independence India for its showy flowers, ox-eye daisies that adorned ornate gardens in Kashmir rapidly spilled out and effortlessly invaded the…
Thiophilus Khojol has been a farmer in Assam's Cachar district on the hill slopes along the Assam-Manipur border, for over 20 years. The district's pineapple production hit an all-time high…
Extreme rainfall deficiencies were not the only causes of famines in semi-arid regions of southern India in the 18th to 20th centuries, according to research that blends paleoclimate reconstruction and…
As outbreaks of Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) or ‘monkey fever’ rapidly expand across the Western Ghats, a study finds that in landscapes undergoing forest loss, a lower number of mammalian…
Senior Zoological Survey of India scientist Dhriti Banerjee has straddled two different worlds of research — physiology of drug abuse and working on the use of insects in forensic investigations…
Mega herbivores undertake vast migrations across large landscapes in several parts of the world. Wildebeests migrate in the millions through the Serengeti-Maasai Mara ecosystem of East Africa — the largest…
One hot 2019 afternoon in Lakshadweep, as marine mammal scientist Divya Panicker sat engrossed in listening to recordings retrieved from underwater sound recorders, she came across low blue whale moans,…
City parks and residential gardens have a unique functional microbiome with more potential human and plant pathogens, and fewer plant-symbionts than neighbouring natural ecosystems, according to a study that unpacks…
Aesthetically, they may not quite cut it, but these two-tiered sanitation structures, set against the sprawling cold deserts of the Indian Himalayas, have supplied organic manure to local communities for…
With over 60 species of grasses, Kutch’s Banni grassland, India’s largest, is home to an array of wildlife and key to its dairy industry. The grasses satiate the livestock reared…
The impacts of armed conflicts on wildlife globally are underestimated, according to recent research which calls for urgent attention to conflict resiliency in conservation plans for a wide suite of…
Political reforms that strengthen the decision-making power of indigenous and forest-dependent communities, over the lands they use, can address challenges with forest carbon finance in India that has a poor…
Sediment cores harvested from beneath the seafloor in the Bay of Bengal, off the Indian coast, have uncovered that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and related warming were “major players” in…
