Right after the monsoon spell, the coastlines of India’s western states, from Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Goa to Karnataka, are lined with dark, sticky balls. These are tarballs, a “seasonal phenomena”…
Large grass-eating mammals such as yak and ibex play a crucial role in stabilising the pool of soil carbon in grazing ecosystems that are a big part of the Earth’s…
“Our habitat was once a thick jungle in which trees such as Magnolia sp., Dipterocarpus sp., Pinus sp., Phoebe hainesiana, Quercus sp. and more, as large as three to four metres…
In 2018, activist Gopal Jhaveri in Mumbai, discovered that four coconut trees in his area, Borivali, had been poisoned by miscreants to achieve a clear view for an advertisement hoarding.…
Few terms are more paradoxically promising to a scientist than ‘open data’. ‘Funding approved’ is better, but that’s not the subject of this review. Open data promises ‘data’, the cornerstone…
Alarm bells ring for the white-winged wood duck (WWWD). Declared the state bird of Assam in 2003, the on-ground conservation situation of the bird has not improved in recent years.…
Meeting India’s clean air and energy goals could substantially reduce anaemia prevalence among women of reproductive age, according to a study that links exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) to…
The recently-concluded Governing Body session of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) negotiated farmers’ rights over plant genetic resources in food and agriculture. It…
Fifty years after the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 came into existence, raising hope that human-animal conflicts would reduce and poachers who were decimating our forest and rivers of their animal…
The eastern coastal state of Odisha, with a 480-kilometre long coastline, has been imposing two fishing bans annually for over two decades in order to conserve the fish population and…
One among the many critical biodiversity-rich landscapes spread across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region, the far eastern Himalayas, is home to several species of rare, endemic, and threatened flora…
Who can forget the image of Tarzan swinging from tree to tree, crossing streams hanging on woody vines? Tarzan's natural bridges and ladders in the forest are a category of…
On September 17, India will wake up to welcome African cheetahs flying 11 hours non-stop, from Namibia, in a customised aircraft. A forest patch in central India is at the…
In 2020, zoologist Bivek Gautam and members of his team were exploring the forests of eastern Nepal on an expedition to look for the Himalayan salamander (Tylototriton himalayanus). That's when…
Biodiversity finance is the practice of raising capital and managing funds for biodiversity conservation. It comes under the umbrella topic of conservation finance, which aims to financially support the conservation…
When the Union Government proposed amendments to the Biological Diversity Act (2002) in December 2021, it was criticised for opening up the country’s biodiversity resources to increased exploitation. Subsequently, the…
Prabhat and Prabin Sharma own a cattle farm of 85 buffaloes in Paschim Boragaon village near the Deepor Beel, the only Ramsar site in Assam. This is their native village…
Between October 2019 and January 2020, a group of mosquito hunters was carefully nurturing mosquito larvae in makeshift labs on the Lakshadweep archipelago in the Arabian Sea, patiently waiting until…
The high peaks of the Himalayas, rising in places to more than 8,800 metres (29,000 feet), act as a physical barrier separating nuclear-armed neighbours. The mountains serve as a wall…
In early May 2022, the Karnataka government announced its plan to denotify two-thirds of its deemed forest land. As part of this, 6.64 lakh hectares of forest out of 9.94…
