"Rainfed agriculture in India is a risky enterprise, owing to uncertainties in rainfall,” reads a World Bank article published in February 2023. More than half of India's net sown area…
Just days before the Lok Sabha passed the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Bill, 2023 — with little heed paid to the genuine concerns raised about its provisions by ecologists, bureaucrats, tribal…
Armed with the idea that shifting cultivation is primitive and unsustainable, based on a certain narrative she was exposed to in the academic world, Assam-born researcher Joli Rumi Borah had…
The Tokhü Emong Bird Count (TEBC) is a citizen science initiative with an aim to celebrate the birds of the state of Nagaland. The event has been hailed as Nagaland's…
Famed for its tea, Assam’s tea garden records are giving scientists a glimpse into past rainfall changes in northeast India, plagued by scattered and spotty historical rainfall data. For 12…
Many things signal the imbalance of the natural world. For Tokugha Sumi, a school headmaster, a village council member and the son of the headman of Sapotami village in Nagaland,…
When Sowete-ü K. Letro was growing up in Dimapur, a town in the northeast Indian state of Nagaland, she had a habit of collecting things. The 27-year-old Letro recalls how…
From “shooting with catapults and guns” to “shooting with cameras”, church worker Nuklu Phom mobilised communities in his ancestral village Yaongyimchen, in mountainous Nagaland, to identify an area for conservation…
The recent Dzukou valley fire, which was doused after two weeks, has raised an alert for several groups of people – local inhabitants, tourists, stakeholders, environmentalists and more. The 80-90…
Reconstruction of 700 years of the Brahmaputra river’s water flow in the monsoon season, based on tree-ring data, suggests that the transboundary river’s real flood risk is likely an underestimate…
Chestnut and olive trees that occur naturally in the wild in Manipur have the potential to speed up fallow regrowth in shifting cultivation (jhum) sites and enhance carbon sinks as…
"When there was a famine in the area, people headed to Sendenyu to obtain grains," Gwasinlo Thong recounts an old saying of the Rengma people. This indigenous community inhabits Nagaland's…
Shifting cultivation continues to be a predominant agricultural practice in many parts of India, despite state discouragement and multipronged efforts to wean indigenous communities away from it. Their land, due…
Conservation biologists are coming to terms with a new normal in the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic with disrupted food supply for animals, postponed fieldwork and training, and the possibility…
Through the use of the visual medium, the Green Hub Project in northeast India engages and empowers youth across eight states in the region, especially from remote tribal areas and…
The lack of alternative livelihood options is reinforcing the attachment of the Konyaks, a Nagaland tribe, to the practice of shifting cultivation (jhum), highlights a new study. This perceived economic…
As India battles invasion of the cereal-eating moth, fall armyworm (FAW), which is now chomping its way into northeastern states, scientists have turned their attention to another incursion, from the…
The Himalayas support about 20 percent of the world’s population. But the ecologically fragile region, the storehouse of the third highest amount of frozen water on earth, is highly vulnerable…
Days after it was satellite tagged and released, an Amur falcon ‘Manipur’, eponymously named after the northeast Indian state bordering Myanmar, was allegedly shot down by unknown miscreants at a…
Community-led conservation initiatives from northeast India were in the spotlight at this year’s India Biodiversity Awards. Community reserves managed by Singchung Bugun Village Community Reserve Management Committee in Arunachal Pradesh…
