Believed to have been introduced by the British in pre-Independence India for its showy flowers, ox-eye daisies that adorned ornate gardens in Kashmir rapidly spilled out and effortlessly invaded the…
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…
When Terde Yomcha brought Luba home, she was so tiny that she could fit in his hands. Luba is an Asiatic black bear cub—a species threatened by illegal wildlife trade…
In Sikkim in the eastern Himalayas, religious and cultural ties have helped preserve patches of forests attached to monasteries for centuries. These sacred groves are also crucial to the fight…
In the last week of December 2020, a video of a leopard scaling fences and roaming the streets in the Bagh-e-Mehtab locality near Srinagar, startled people in Kashmir valley. It…
Land-use changes in the western Himalayan forests, a global biodiversity hotspot with huge numbers of endemic species, have resulted in a massive decline in forest birds in the region, new…
As authorities race to rescue people trapped in Uttarakhand, following a devastating landslide-induced flash flood on February 7, scientists have called for deciphering the possibility of glacier-related hazards and enhance…
An analysis of 119 years of rainfall measurements at different rain gauge stations across northeast India, has revealed a decreasing trend in summer rainfall since 1973, including in rainy Meghalaya,…
Till recently, the hilly state of Himachal Pradesh (HP) was only making wild guesses about the population status of the snow leopard, the state animal of HP. After three years,…
Unpacking patterns of leopard attacks on livestock and landscape features in the Indian Himalayas offers clues to potential human-leopard conflict hotspots, a study has said amid increasing encounters of wildlife…
Certified disease-free and blessed by a Lama in Bhutan, Druk, a four-year-old yak bull, crossed the border and traveled to the state of Sikkim in India in February 2020, in…
The pastoral yak rearing system in Sikkim in the eastern Himalayas is changing to cope with climatic changes that have led to snowfall getting thinner in the last 15 years,…
The rush of water ripped through the valley like an excavator. On August 6, 2019, unusually heavy monsoon rain drenched the mountainside above the Punatsangchhu river in Bhutan, causing an…
Snowmelt is the largest contributor to average annual runoff for the Chhota Shigri glacier catchment in the western Himalayas, finds a team of researchers from India and France in a…
In the scenic Western Himalayan foothills, an artificial intelligence (AI) application has sniffed out how natural resource management policies are doing on the ground. The AI application used a machine…
In January this year, over a hundred trainee mountaineers rappelled down Tenzing Rock, a natural rock in India’s Darjeeling city, named after the legendary Sherpa Tenzing Norgay who with Sir…
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…
Unseasonal rain and snowfall is the main reason for agriculture failing in Himachal Pradesh. “Hailstorms or torrential rains are usually destructive to our crops while snowfall is not,” said Uma…
In eastern Himalayas’ Khangchendzonga National Park (KNP), eye-catching Wight's rhododendron shrubs and graceful firs, frame the upper limits of the sub-alpine forests. Beyond this boundary of closed canopy forests, called…
Every year an average of about 100 million tourists visit the ecologically sensitive Indian Himalayan region (IHR), which is home to about 50 million people. In seven years, the number…