Biodiversity News

On the outskirts of a bustling New Delhi, the quiet village of Mangar in Haryana has long held a secret in its caves: ancient paintings. Growing up grazing livestock in…

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…

If depleting groundwater resources was one of the reasons why the Madurai bench of the Madras high court passed a landmark judgement in 2014 to remove all eucalyptus and wattle…

While working on a project to document Maharashtra’s endemic species, researchers from the Naoroji Godrej Centre for Plant Research (NGCPR) came across a unique tree that they had never seen…

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…

The threat of Maoist conflict is now looming in Chhattisgarh's Achanakmar Tiger Reserve. The central government recently included Mungeli district, where the tiger reserve is located, in the list of…

The oran (sacred grove) is an integral part of Rajasthan’s culture. Rich in biodiversity and usually with water bodies within, orans are akin to oases in the dry state. The…

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…

“For a crop loss worth Rs. 15,000 per acre, we receive only Rs. 6,000 in compensation from the forest department. That money is of no use to us; we have…

Biological invasions are a major global challenge for the conservation of biodiversity, maintenance of ecosystem health and sustainable livelihoods. India is not new to the concept and consequences of invasive…

The United Nations declared the decade of 2021-2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently released the first draft of a new framework…

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…

The Konkan Fruit Fest (KFF) is an initiative of Miguel Braganza and his team from Botanical Society of Goa, to preserve endangered food biodiversity by providing fruit growers a forum…

One of the key announcements by the newly-formed cabinet, led by Himanta Biswa Sarma, in Assam, was of two new national parks in the state - Raimona in Kokrajhar and…

Expanding the land area under agroforestry systems, which integrate trees alongside crops, is a promising strategy to offset greenhouse gas emissions and could help achieve India’s Nationally Determined Contributions to…

Zebra loach a popular aquarium species is being “unsustainably fished” out of Western Ghats’ waters to grace fish tanks across the world, says a new study underscoring the execution of…

In 2019, black wattle trees stood tall in around 50 hectares of land in Pazhathottam in Kerala’s Pambadum Shola National Park. Black wattle, in India, is an exotic, invasive tree…

In August 2019, President Ram Nath Kovind gave assent to a legislation for bifurcation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories (UTs) - Jammu and Kashmir,…