nandini velho

Hunting and deforestation are the two biggest threats to vertebrates in Southeast Asia. In the last 50 years, monoculture rubber plantations replaced large areas of tropical rainforests in Xishuangbanna, southwest China. We set up camera traps at 109 stations (57 in forest reserves and 52 in rubber plantations) to determine the distribution of mammal species in Menglun, Xishuangbanna. We also interviewed 37 experienced hunters (mean age: 54) in the study area to understand their perceptions of species abundance trends. We used hierarchical multispecies occupancy modelling to determine the effect of distance to village, distance to forest edge and elevation on mammal occupancy after accounting for imperfect detection. We used non‐parametric tests for the rank data to evaluate perceived species trends. Using a combination of historical literature (1954–1985), hunter interviews, direct observations and camera‐trap surveys, we only recorded 56% (15 out of 27) of the medium‐to‐large size...

Background: In India, heterogenous tribal populations are grouped together under a common category, Scheduled Tribe, for affirmative action. Many tribal communities are closely associated with forests and difficult-to-reach areas and have worse-off health and nutrition indicators. However, poor population health outcomes cannot be explained by geography alone. Social determinants of health, especially various social disadvantages, compound the problem of access and utilisation of health services and undermine their health and nutritional status. The Towards Health Equity and Transformative Action on tribal health (THETA) study has three objectives: (1) describe and analyse extent and patterns of health inequalities, (2) generate theoretical explanations, and (3) pilot an intervention to validate the explanation.     Methods: For objective 1, we will conduct household surveys in seven forest areas covering 2722 households in five states across India, along a gradient of socio-geograp...

A large number of economically disadvantaged people live around protected areas. Conservation efforts that focus on poverty alleviation, work on the premise that an increase in household wealth decreases use of forest resources. We surveyed 1222 households across four tiger reserves to test the paradigm that an increase in assets leads to reduced forest use and we also assess the effects of other socio-economic factors. We find that increase in assets may reduce Non-timber Forest Product (NTFP) collection, but may not necessarily reduce livestock numbers or use of wood as a cooking fuel. Households that faced more economic setbacks were more likely to state that they wanted more livestock in the future. Education is positively associated with choosing Liquefied Petroleum Gas as a cooking fuel in the future. We find site and resource-specific variation. Fifty percent of all households (range across sites: 6-98) want to collect NTFP while 91% (range: 87-96) want to retain or own more ...

Background The data available for the health of Scheduled Tribes (ST) in India are often coarse-scale snapshots of health status and healthcare access showing poorer indicators when compared to others but do not allow fine-scale analysis. In this paper, we examined health inequalities between ST and non-ST populations in two forested sites and compare healthcare parameters for ST populations across three forested sites in India. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional household survey in sites in and around Biligiri Ranganathaswamy Temple (BRT), Kanha and Pakke tiger reserves in the south, central and northeast regions of India respectively. In each site, multi-stage sampling and cluster analysis provided a representative sample of households across villages of 859 ST and non-ST households. We examined sociodemographic and health-related information including self-reported illnesses and healthcare utilisation; from these we explored within-site health inequality patterns for two site...

The Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) is a regulatory framework adopted since 1994 in India to evaluate the impact and mitigation measures of projects, however, even after 25 years of adoption, EIAs continue to be of inferior quality with respect to biodiversity documentation and assessment of impacts and their mitigation measures.  This questions the credibility of the exercise, as deficient EIAs are habitually used as a basis for project clearances in ecologically sensitive and irreplaceable regions.  The authors reiterate this point by analysing impact assessment documents for three projects: the doubling of the National Highway-4A, doubling of the railway-line from Castlerock to Kulem, and laying of a 400-kV transmission line through the Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary and National Park in the state of Goa.  Two of these projects were recently granted ‘Wildlife Clearance’ during a virtual meeting of the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) without a t...

Background: The data available for the health of Scheduled Tribes (ST) in India are often coarse-scale snapshots at district and state levels and fine-scale comparison within and across site is often not possible. In this paper, we examine the health inequalities between the ST and non-ST populations in two forested sites and compare the healthcare parameters for ST populations across three forested sites. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional household survey in three sites in and around three tiger reserves in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Arunachal Pradesh (AP). In each site, multi-stage sampling and cluster analysis provided a representative sample of households across villages of 859 ST and non-ST households. We examined the sociodemographic and health-related information including self-reported illnesses and healthcare utilisation; from these, we explored the within-site health inequality patterns for the two sites and intersite differences among the ST households of th...

A majority of Indian wildlife scientists are unable to come together to create a united front to add a much-needed conservation focus to policymaking. In an age when we are trying to balance development with protection of forest areas, wildlife biologists need to actively respond to and engage with situations where the wildlife and conservation angles need to be highlighted. They should make the effort to translate science into policy in conjunction with the bureaucracy and actively work towards creating a much-needed platform for collaboration. A recent article by the authors in this journal (“Turning the Page in Forest Governance: Science and Bureaucracy”, EPW, 10 December 2011) highlighted the need for the forest bureaucracy and wildlife scientists to liaise actively to ensure better forest governance, pointing out how the forest bureaucracy often made it diffi cult for independent scientists to engage meaningfully with them. To highlight the other side of the story, as it were, ...

[Extract from Introduction] Protected areas in the tropics account for a quarter of the world's nature reserves and collectively support over half of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity (Nelson and Chomitz, 2011). As such, they are enormously important for the future of native flora and fauna. Despite the large extent of tropical protected areas, there is substantial overlap between human-use areas (for instance, for extractive and agricultural purposes) and landscapes vital to the conservation of globally significant biodiversity (Araujo and Rahbek, 2007). Human activities in such areas of overlap have more often than not resulted in deleterious impacts on populations of wild flora and fauna. Importantly, massive deforestation in and around the buffers of protected areas (DeFries et al., 2005), coupled with the overhunting of wildlife across the tropics, have been major causes for drastic population declines of numerous species. In some cases, over-hunting has even led to outright local extirpations (Milner- Gulland and Bennett, 2003; Bennett et al., 2006). In such situations, protected areas are often considered the cornerstone of conservation strategies (Hockings, 2003) and the first line of defense to contain poaching and other forms of encroachment (Bruner et al., 2001; Nelson and Chomitz, 2011). Protected areas are also known to reduce deforestation rates in the surrounding and wider landscape (Gaveau et al., 2009), improve biodiversity conservation and community well-being (Levrington et al., 2010). However, one of the greatest challenges protected areas face, and one that undermines their potential for effective wildlife conservation, is continuing anthropogenic pressure arising from habitat loss, fragmentation (DeFries et al., 2005), and hunting (Wright, 2005; Laurance et al., 2012). Yet one of the broad themes when evaluating management effectiveness of protected areas is to understand whether the conservation values of protected areas are safeguarded (Hockings et al., 2006). But as protected areas continue to suffer degradation, and adjacent unprotected areas are converted to agriculture and other human uses (Kramer et al., 1997), a crucial knowledge gap is to understand how the existing habitats that remain within and outside of protected areas impact and sustain biodiversity. The decisions related to protected areas and their adjacent lands (which are often managed by resident communities) suffer from a lack of data-driven evidence. For instance, 60% of conservation-management decisions related to protected areas have had to rely on experience-based information given the absence of evidence (Cook et al., 2010), but it is equally important to note that managers value empirical evidence as the most valuable source to implement management actions (Cook et al., 2012). Further, the paucity of data and rigorous studies (in terms of the biodiversity value) in community-managed land is a similar shortcoming (Bowler et al., 2011). An understanding of the relative merits of protected areas versus communitymanaged lands is especially important in the context of tropical developing countries that harbour many threatened wildlife species (Schipper et al., 2008) and experience socio-economic and cultural pressures that can imperil wildlife populations. More importantly, such research provides an opportunity to identify strategies that might allow facilitate human well-being while achieving big gains for wildlife conservation (DeFries et al., 2007). In this context, deliberations about Indian nature conservation must be embedded in the existing biological and sociological contexts. It would almost be proverbial (and a subject of many essays, a few of which are included in the Appendices of this thesis) to say that conservation in India is complex. Most striking is the sheer size of India's population, which is set to overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2028, and is expected to continue growing at least until the 2060s (United Nations report, 2013). Meeting the needs of a growing economy and improving the standard of living for the estimated 363 million Indians currently living in poverty is an inescapable imperative (estimate of poverty derived in 2011- 2012 by C. Rangarajan). At the same time, India is biodiversity rich — one whose environmental demise would be a global tragedy. India harbours four global biodiversity hotspots, and its forests sustain half of the world's tigers, 60% of all Asian elephants, and 70% of all one-horned rhinoceros (Madhusudan, 2003; Amin et al., 2006). Approximately 270 million people use forest resources as primary and supplementary income sources (Fisher et al., 1997). The tolerance for wildlife that many residents display is remarkable, to say the least. A study of three national parks in India indicates that 89% of the surveyed households reportedly received no compensation for crop-raiding and livestock predation. Such losses were non-trivial with modeled…

Lockdowns intended to control the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major socioeconomic upheavals across the world. While there were numerous reports of these lockdowns benefiting wildlife by reducing human movement and habitat disturbance, increased hunting during these lockdowns emerged as a conservation concern, particular in tropical Asia and Africa. We used online interviews with key informants including wildlife researchers, enforcement staff and NGO employees (N=99), and media reports (N=98), to examine the impacts of India’s COVID-19 lockdown (March-May 2020) on wildlife hunting across the country. We asked whether and how hunting patterns changed during the lockdown, and explored socioeconomic and institutional factors underlying these changes. Over half the interviewees spread over 43 administrative districts perceived hunting (mammals, in particular) to have increased during the lockdown relative to a pre-lockdown reference period. Interviewees identified household consumptio...

A large number of economically disadvantaged people live around protected areas. Conservation efforts that focus on poverty alleviation, work on the premise that an increase in household wealth decreases use of forest resources. We surveyed 1222 households across four tiger reserves to test the paradigm that an increase in assets leads to reduced forest use and we also assess the effects of other socioeconomic factors. We find that increase in assets may reduce Non-timber Forest Product (NTFP) collection, but may not necessarily reduce livestock numbers or use of wood as a cooking fuel. Households that faced more economic setbacks were more likely to state that they wanted more livestock in the future. Education is positively associated with choosing Liquefied Petroleum Gas as a cooking fuel in the future. We find site and resource-specific variation. Fifty percent of all households (range across sites: 6–98) want to collect NTFP while 91% (range: 87–96) want to retain or own more livestock over the next 5–10 years. Understanding current and future resource use will help plan context-specific conservation efforts that are better aligned with reducing specific pressures around protected areas.

Although deforestation and forest degradation have long been considered the most significant threats to tropical biodiversity, across Southeast Asia (Northeast India, Indochina, Sundaland, Philippines) substantial areas of natural habitat have few wild animals (>1 kg), bar a few hunting-tolerant species. To document hunting impacts on vertebrate populations regionally, we conducted an extensive literature review, including papers in local journals and reports of governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Evidence from multiple sites indicated animal populations declined precipitously across the region since approximately 1980, and many species are now extirpated from substantial portions of their former ranges. Hunting is by far the greatest immediate threat to the survival of most of the region's endangered vertebrates. Causes of recent overhunting include improved access to forests and markets, improved hunting technology, and escalating demand for wild meat, wildlife-deriv...

While the National Investment Board is supposed to speed up economic growth, it raises questions about the environment, livelihoods of marginalised people, existing legislations for wildlife and forest conservation and interrelations between the centre and the states ...

Logging is one of the most pervasive threats to biodiversity in tropical forests. In this study, we concurrently examined the responses of the avian frugivore community and the community of fruiting trees to past logging in a tropical forest in northeastern India. We predicted that the abundance of, and visitation by large-bodied frugivores would be lower in logged forests, resulting in reduced seed dispersal and recruitment of biotically dispersed species (especially large-seeded species). Data were collected from two logged and unlogged sites using (a) belt transects for estimating avian frugivore abundance (b) fruiting tree watches to quantify frugivore visitation and (c) vegetation plots to characterize recruitment. Our results show that differences in the abundance of bird species between logged and unlogged sites was correlated with body mass, with larger species being scarcer and smaller species more abundant in logged areas. Correspondingly, visitation rates by large avian frugivores was lower in logged compared with unlogged sites. Finally, biotically dispersed tree species, especially large-seeded species, had lower recruitment in logged forests, potentially due to lowered visitation rates and decreased fruit removal by large bodied avian frugivores. In the long term, these differences in recruitment may result in a tree community shift towards small-seeded biotically dispersed species and abiotically dispersed species in logged areas.► We examine community-level responses of avian frugivores and fruit trees to past logging. ► Larger avian frugivores species were scarcer and smaller species more abundant in logged areas. ► Visitation rates to fruit trees by large frugivores was lower in logged compared with unlogged sites. ► Large-seeded biotically dispersed tree species had especially depressed recruitment in logged forests. ► These patterns might cause a community shift towards small seeded/abiotically dispersed trees.

Where hunting pressure is high, anti-poaching efforts are often crucial for protecting native wildlife populations in nature reserves. However, many reserves suffer from inadequate support and provisioning of staff, especially in developing nations. In Pakke Tiger Reserve in northeastern India, we found that malarial infection is a serious hindrance for front-line patrolling staff that limits the time they can spend in the field. We assessed the consequences of malaria both for local people and park staff in the general region and its indirect effects on wildlife protection. To accomplish this we compiled data from annual epidemiological records of malaria, the number of malaria cases and associated mortality, financial costs, and loss of time spent patrolling. Over a 4-year period (2006–2009), the majority (71%) of forest department staff in Pakke Tiger Reserve suffered from malaria. Malaria treatments cost park managers nearly 3% of their total budget and caused a net loss of 44,160 man hours of anti-poaching effort. The government forest and health departments involved in the employment and health of park staff have separate missions and responsibilities, yet our findings show that a multi-disciplinary approach to conservation is essential to avoid overall systemic failure.

"Tropical tree species vary widely in their pattern
of spatial dispersion. We focus on how seed predation
may modify seed deposition patterns and affect the abundance
and dispersion of adult trees in a tropical forest in
India. Using plots across a range of seed densities, we
examined whether seed predation levels by terrestrial
rodents varied across six large-seeded, bird-dispersed tree
species. Since inter-specific variation in density-dependent
seed mortality may have downstream effects on recruitment
and adult tree stages, we determined recruitment
patterns close to and away from parent trees, along with
adult tree abundance and dispersion patterns. Four species
(Canarium resiniferum, Dysoxylum binectariferum, Horsfieldia
kingii, and Prunus ceylanica) showed high predation
levels (78.5–98.7%) and increased mortality with increasing
seed density, while two species, Chisocheton cumingianus
and Polyalthia simiarum, showed significantly
lower seed predation levels and weak density-dependent
mortality. The latter two species also had the highest
recruitment near parent trees, with most abundant and
aggregated adults. The four species that had high seed
mortality had low recruitment under parent trees, were rare,
and had more spaced adult tree dispersion. Biotic dispersal
may be vital for species that suffer density-dependent
mortality factors under parent trees. In tropical forests
where large vertebrate seed dispersers but not seed predators
are hunted, differences in seed vulnerability to rodent
seed predation and density-dependent mortality can affect
forest structure and composition."

Worldwide decline and losses of amphi-bians in human disturbed and in relati-vely undisturbed habitats have become an issue of great concern. Most of the re-search on amphibian decline, worldwide, has focused either on monitoring or in-ventorying, to identify the ...

... 2008 By Nandini Velho Post-Graduate Program in Wildlife Biology & Conservation Centre for Wildlife Studies and ... Corresponding author Nandini Velho 103, General Bernard Guedes Road Panjim Goa 403001 INDIA Email: nandinivelho@gmail.com Page 20. 10 ABSTRACT ...