Off the tourist trail and away from the resorts that crowd Munnar’s lush hills in the Western Ghats is a two-storey red-brick building that overlooks tea gardens, eucalyptus plantations, mountains…
At his 38-acre coffee estate at 3,800 ft, overlooking the pristine Baba Budan giri (hill) in Chikmagalur district of Karnataka, I.S. Umeshchandra is working on creating a database of rainfall…
The Longwood Shola, the last and the only urban shola forest in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu was recently granted the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy (QCC) accreditation, a forest conservation…
Drawing attention to the restriction of elephant movement due to development and infrastructure barriers, scientists studying genetic differences between elephant populations in the country have expressed concern over genetic differences…
In June 2020, 20-year-old Arnav Gandhe was on a birding visit to Pune’s Mahatma hill, an offshoot of the biodiverse Western Ghats. He was about to wrap up for the…
The term 'gecko' might lead one to picture the drab brownish lizards ambling on the walls in homes, occasionally sticking out a tongue to grab insects and then disappearing into…
Traditional healer Janakiamma (60) belongs to the Kurumba community. An indigenous community in south India, Kurumba is listed by the government of India as one of the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal…
More than two decades since he began unraveling secrets of the tropical savannahs – open grasslands with scattered trees – field ecologist Mahesh Sankaran continues to be fascinated with these…
When conservation efforts collide with policies or actions that are detrimental to the environment, it is an easier choice to pick sides. But when demarcation of critical wildlife habitats end…
“Powerbaaz”. “Main boss”. No, these descriptions don’t refer to any power-hungry politician or underworld don. It’s how the indigenous Warli people of Maharashtra see their animal god, the Waghoba. The…
Born into a marginalised family in 1937 in Kerala, his umbilical cord looked almost like a bloated seed of a common mangrove tree. So, his parents who worked as farm…
As outbreaks of Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) or ‘monkey fever’ rapidly expand across the Western Ghats, a study finds that in landscapes undergoing forest loss, a lower number of mammalian…
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…
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…
Persistent, colder climates in the last Ice Age contributed to limiting the distribution of certain commercially and medicinally-important forest species such as cobra saffron (nagkesar) to smaller forest patches that…
Protected areas in India's Western Ghats prominently feature as top destinations for tiger and elephant ecotourism and in conservation action. But the biodiverse-rich region traversing India's southern and western states…
While Kerala's contentious Athirapilly dam may be temporarily on hold due to peoples' resistance, a smaller 7.5 megawatt hydropower project in the vicinity has got both environmentalists and indigenous communities…
As dusk turned to evening on Friday, August 10, the residents of Kerala and its diaspora spread across the world, watched the television with alarm as water released from the…
The Kabini river originates in the Western Ghats of northern Kerala. Cutting through the Ghats, it flows eastwards to join the Cauvery river in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. During…
The Western Ghats, a stretch of mountains running parallel to the western Indian coast, is a biodiversity hotspot, home to countless species that are unique to the region — known…
