As Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity debate the issue of access and benefit-sharing from digital sequence information on genetic sources (DSI) at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15), a…
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…
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,…
Thirty-five-year-old Ramaprasad Maiti, a resident of a Sundarbans island, has moved houses 17 times in his lifetime as erosion tore them down and washed them into the river one by…
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 April 2021, Cdr. Gopakumar K. and his colleagues from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) reached the central Indian Ocean with Varaha-1, a deep-sea mining machine. The 9.5-tonne…
Environmental changes, including changing rainfall patterns and vegetation, have affected Rajasthan’s desert ecology, impacting local flora and fauna. Rajasthan, the desert state of India, was in the news this July…
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.…
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…
A 700 to 800 metres stretch of mangroves to the west of Pakhiraloy ferry ghat on an island in the Indian Sundarbans, part of a plantation project in 2020, was…
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…
Srinivas Behera’s family in Mangalajodi village on the northern banks of the Chilika lake in Odisha along India’s east coast has been engaged in the fishing business for as long…
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…
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…
Several women scientists from Kashmir are at the forefront of research to tackle changing climatic patterns that threaten local ecologies, livelihoods and networks that sustain them. Scientists Nasheeman Ashraf, Ulfat…
