Asian elephants, despite needing 150 kilograms of wild fodder every day, are picky eaters, suggests a recent study in PLOS One by scientists from the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology…
Mass flowering is an enchanting phenomenon that occurs across the world. In India, the neelakurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana) bloom, where swathes of the landscape become carpeted in flowers, is a well-known…
After marathon negotiations and a clutch of protests, including a “die-in” by global youth and a walk-out by developing countries over a funding stalemate, nearly 200 nations struck a historic…
The UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 15), underway in Canada, is seeing the formalisation of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and the signing of the “30 by 30” goal, to aid…
Ambitious and quantitative targets, with a focus on tackling the drivers of biodiversity decline, should be reflected in a successful Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), says Sandra Diaz, Argentine ecologist and…
After multiple postponements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments began the final round of negotiations at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Canada to thrash out a landmark deal…
When diatom hunter Karthick Balasubramanian was invited to a research expedition on the Blue Mountains of Mizoram, little did he know the trek would result in producing the first dataset…
The 18th and 19th centuries' Sri Lanka saw many British naturalists studying the island’s rich biodiversity. They also contributed to profiling the same. One of them, W.W.A. Phillips, a tea…
Sheikh Mohammad Sultan, a saffron grower in his sixties is uncertain about the future of the saffron industry in the Kashmir valley. Sultan and his family, while plucking saffron flowers,…
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…