Located in Alwar District, Rajasthan, Sariska Tiger Reserve used to be the hunting preserve of the Alwar estate. Spread over 880 square kilometres, this has always been an important connector of the Northern India tiger and leopard corridor. The reserve was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1958 and a tiger reserve under the Indian government’s Project Tiger in 1979. Unfortunately, the robust population of around 28 tigers in Sariska was totally wiped out by 2003-04. Most were poached by the infamous Sansar Chand, who probably relied on the support of the local population and the still existing villages within the reserve. Whatever be the case, this unfortunate turn of events led to the vanishing of the apex level predator in the food chain in this area.

Everything is interrelated in the jungle. The demise of the tiger altered the topography of the park, resulting in a sharp increase in the population of antlers, the erstwhile favorite food of the tiger in the park. This spotted deer that I have photographed looks pretty, batting its ridiculously long lashes, but without the king of the jungle, rising deer populations decimated grasslands and shrubs. The resultant forest degradation made the habitat even more difficult for wildlife to survive and thrive.

In 2009, Sariska became the first reserve in the world where tigers were successfully relocated. These were the first tigers this thorny, arid scrub forest had seen in years. The joy was, however, short-lived. The first reintroduced male tiger died after feeding on a poisoned cattle carcass and relocated tigresses did not breed as expected. Was the forest too stressed because of human activity for it to regenerate and tigers to flourish once more?

Things started looking up by 2012, when a female tigress named ST-2 was sighted with cubs. Sansar Chand died in 2014 and poaching activities slowed down. Better forest management techniques were subsequently enforced and big cats started making a slow comeback. Relocation of six villages from the core areas reduced human activity inside the jungle. This improved the habitat and gave tigers much needed space to move about freely. 

Sariska has become a success story with the tiger population going up steadily. 23 tigers live here now, including three cubs. The enforced lockdown has given an unexpected and happy boost to the conservation efforts at the Park. This year, I have seen several individuals, including ST9, ST3 and ST6. Since September 2021, ST21 and ST9 have been courting. Hopefully their courtship will herald some good news for conservationists here!

In architecture, the keystone at the top of an arch holds the arch together. Without the keystone, the whole arch and building surrounding collapses! Tigers are regarded as keystone species in their habitat. The return of tigers to Sariska has had an immeasurable impact on its biodiversity and ecological health. 

Today, the slow but steady repopulation of tigers in Sariska holds important lessons in the viability of such rewilding programs. Do radio collars around the neck hinder breeding success? Can rewilding be successful in forests with a lot of human activity? Are some tigers more efficient breeders than others? And what can be done to improve the survival rate of tiger cubs? Perhaps the answers to such questions will bring greater focus and success to species reintroduction programs across the world. 

In the meantime, Sariska has become my favourite weekend destination from Delhi to get a quick and wholesome experience of these majestic creatures in the wild!

Author: Devendra Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Devendra Singh

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In spring, the woodland in Blean, Kent, is rich in fresh greenery and soundtracked by trilling birdsong. Soon, this will also be a place where you could glimpse an animal that hasn’t been seen here for 6,000 years. In the distance, you might see a furry brown bison rubbing its vast form against a tree to scratch an itch, or taking a crashing dust bath.

European bison are regarded by conservationists as a ‘keystone’ species, missing from UK landscapes; animals whose natural behaviours are invaluable for woodland ecosystems. Bison help to kill off some trees by eating and rubbing up against their bark, which allows light and new vegetation to come through; and stir up soil by taking ‘baths’. All of this can boost an area’s biodiversity, having a significant positive impact all the way up the food chain. And destroying some trees and plants, bison can even help to kill off some invasive, non-native species. 

“Most English woodland is in a really bad ecological state,” says Evan Bowen-Jones, chief executive of Kent Wildlife Trust, which is behind the reintroduction of bison to Blean in spring 2022. “Everywhere in the UK, biodiversity has been plummeting, and one of our big risks nationally is that our ecosystems are so simplified that we are vulnerable to collapse under climate change,” he explains. “We need to create more ecologically resilient landscapes – and bison are animals that are ‘ecosystem engineers’, that will do the work for us.”

The UK’s leading conservation charity, Kent Wildlife Trust owns almost 2,500 acres of ancient woodland in Blean. Its ‘Wilder Blean’ rewilding initiative will see, initially, a small herd of bison released to roam in 1,000 acres of it, safely fenced off from public footpaths. The landmark £1.2m project will be carefully monitored and if successful, has the potential to be replicated more widely. 

Initially, a herd of just six bison will be released, with the hope that they will breed. The trust has not yet revealed where the animals will come from, but similar projects include one in Zuid Kennemerland National Park in The Netherlands [some members of which are pictured here]. UK animal licensing laws mean that the initial herd can’t exceed ten animals, but when they do, a second herd can be created in another part of the woodland, as well as in partnerships with charities that own more nearby woodland. The areas in which bison are present will be contrasted with those in which they are not, creating a new body of data to demonstrate the transformative impact of bison on English woodlands. This could be leveraged to help persuade lawmakers to lessen the costly legal and financial restrictions on managing bison, which are – arguably illogically – categorised as dangerous wild animals in UK law, and require more safety infrastructure and spending than in other countries. 

For this reason, the Wilder Blean bison project, including multiple layers of specialist fencing and tunnels, has cost more than £1.2m (sourced primarily from a lottery grant).

Kent Wildlife Trust’s plan was inspired by the success of bison reintroduction in The Netherlands, where there is two decades’ worth of evidence to support bison as a conservation tool. “In Europe they are further ahead with this,” says Bowen-Jones. “We need to re-prove everything in the UK context, and we accept that, but the learning from Holland is clear.”

Given that bison would naturally have roamed across a wide variety of landscapes, their reintroduction is an ecological tool that might, in theory, be widely replicated across the UK; Bowen-Jones mentions sand dunes in Cornwall and national parks in the north of the UK as examples. More data from what happens once the bison are ensconced in Blean will help prove what the reality of their presence means for today’s United Kingdom. 

“Their natural behaviours will have all sorts of effects, some of which we know about and some of which we don’t,” says Bowen-Jones. He has seen evidence from The Netherlands that bison themselves are a versatile conservation tool, but he emphasises that the financial and legal  constraints on bison reintroduction limit the application in other contexts.

That said, Bowen-Jones is heartened by the prospect of these great bovines grazing the garden of England. “Bison would have roamed over massive areas; they are a missing component from the vast majority of habitats in this county,” he says. Blean, he hopes, will be key to making the case for bison as a conservation icon for a new era of rewilding.

Author: Sophy Grimshaw, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Banner image and 1. Ray Lewis, 2. Tom Cawdron, 3. Evan Bowen-Jones

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We think of Delhi as a concrete jungle, which, indubitably, it is. However, the city is on the tail end of the Aravallis and their forests, many of which are, happily, in different stages of rewilding. Recent surveys of these forests show that they harbour an astonishingly rich diversity of wildlife with relatively high densities of mammals in non-protected areas. As someone who has been documenting life in these forests over the last few decades, I have, in recent times, chronicled many species that used to be rare to find and can now be spotted.

The growing awareness about the conservation and protection of Delhi’s urban forests is a welcome breath of fresh air for conservationists and wildlife lovers like me. Much more needs to be done but I am happy that in my years as a chronicler of the city’s animals, I have got to see some of these amazing species return to their lost habitats.

Author: Devendra Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Devendra Singh

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For fish, rivers are high-speed traffic lanes in the same way that motorways are for humans. The Ruhr in west Germany, for example, is such a highway, leading fish to spawning and feeding grounds as well as summer or winter resting places in small lakes and tributaries. On those motorways, however, fish, just like humans, also have to deal with narrow lanes, road works or complete closures. And any such obstacle can have serious consequences for species diversity.

“Fish need unobstructed water ways as they depend on different conditions in different life stages,” says Svenja Storm, a fishing biologist at the regional fishing association of Westphalia/Lippe. “Where an adult fish finds the optimal food for itself, there does not have to be a suitable place for the positioning of spawn or the growth of the young fish. In fact, all fish species migrate in the course of their life in order to optimize their food intake, to avoid unfavourable conditions such as water bodies falling dry to increase the reproductive success.”

One man currently trying to solve this problem is Markus Kühlmann. The 53-year-old engineer has spent the last nine years transforming the 219-kilometre-long Ruhr into the aquatic superhighway it once was. At Baldeney weir near Essen, Kühlmann, together with a team of engineers, biologists, ecologists and hydraulic engineers, developed a system that is unique to the world: a continuously running elevator which transports the fish to the top of the weir.

Part of the impetus for the project, which cost a cool US $8 million, were regulations published by the European Union and the German Environment Agency which require all water bodies in Germany to be in “good condition” again by 2027. Within this regulation was the provision for every German river to be passable for fish.

There being the political will to get Kühlmann’s project off the ground, there was an immediate problem. This location in the Ruhr was not spacious enough for a traditional fish ladder (a series of pools where one is a little higher than the next to allow fish to climb the distance step by step).

Looking for an alternative, Kühlmann found novel fish elevator designs in France, Australia and the United States: “But they did not cover enough height or were created only for certain species,” he says. “We had to come up with something completely new.” He teamed up with engineers from southern Germany as well the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to first develop a computer simulation.

The way the eventual elevator design works is simple: there’s a tube with a flexible chamber; when the chamber is at the bottom, the fish enter, get transported nine meters upwards and exit the chamber again to continue their journey. To prevent fish from queuing in front of a closed door at the bottom while the lift is at the top, the system consists of two tubes with alternating elevators. Kühlmann and his team developed specific algorithms and underwater sonars to detect when the chamber is full or if a particularly large fish – possibly a predator – is waiting in the elevator and preventing other fish from entering. (The large fish is then transported separately.) “A second software is fed with environmental data that influence the migration activity of the animals, such as season, water temperature or moon phase. That way, the operating intervals of the elevator automatically adjust,” Kühlmann explains.

After years of development, the fish elevator started operating in August 2020 and has been running round the clock since then.

Officials from other cities such as Augsburg are looking to adopt the high-tech elevator model, although Kühlmann admits the price tag of what’s currently a bespoke build will inhibit roll-out of replicas of the Baldeney fish ladder across the globe. That said, Kühlmann hopes his insights will help other regions to think more radically about how they can help migratory fish get from A to B.

Author: Florian Sturm, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Florian Sturm

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Apart from coastal bathers who’ve gingerly waded through its tickling stems or sailors who snared their anchors in its undergrowth, few of us are aware of the 60-plus species of marine flowering plants that constitute seagrass. Fewer of us still appreciate that, like their submarine cousin coral, seagrass orchards are under threat. “The problem with seagrass is that it’s not a charismatic habitat like your coral reef or tropical mangrove,” says Project Seagrass’ Leanne Cullen-Unsworth of the family marine plants that grow in shallow and sheltered coastal waters across the globe.

Seagrass provides a range of services to terrestrial ecosystems: food and habitat for marine organisms, maintaining water quality and stabilising the seabed. Most importantly, seagrass meadows are the hidden stars of carbon sequestration; absorbing atmospheric carbon at quicker and higher rates than ecosystems such as tropical forests, one hectare of seagrass can store around 400 kg of carbon dioxide per year, up to 40 times more than a hectare of dry-land forest. (Making it second only to arctic tundra in its capacity as a carbon sink.)

Partly this is down to seagrass’ marine habitat, where oxygen-free sediment traps the carbon in plant material which then remains buried for hundreds of years after the plant dies (unlike the carbon in forests, which can readily be released by burning for fuel).

So seagrass’ loss is a problem for all of us. And sadly, in most global contexts these hard-working marine flora are receding. It is estimated that 92 percent of seagrass in British coasts has been lost in the last century, much of this erosion having occurred by the mid 20th century, when poor water quality borne of rapid industrialisation led to a wasting disease that scientists believe decimated seagrass meadows. Sediments and turbidity have also played their part in seagrass’ demise, as has physical damage from anchors and fishing nets, commercial seaweed production and the tourist industry, where aesthetics of pristine sands and transparent seas reign supreme.

“In tourist spots in the Indo-Pacific it’s common for seagrass to be torn up so a beach looks like the picture postcards,” Cullen-Unsworth says, who is however at pains to point out that seagrass conservation is not simply pitted against human activity – it provides a nursery habitat for commercial fish stocks such as tiger prawn, conch, Atlantic cod and white-spotted spinefoot. Cullen-Unsworth is one of the founders of Project Seagrass, a nonprofit that’s working to raise awareness of this underrated habitat and is undertaking pilot projects to explore how to best regrow eroded seagrass orchards.

Project Seagrass’ first large-scale project, Seagrass Ocean Rescue, is a partnership between Project Seagrass, Cardiff and Swansea universities and Pembrokeshire Coastal forum that aims to reestablish 20,000 square metre seagrass meadow in Dale, West Wales to demonstrate its environmental and biodiversity benefits, and serve as a model that could be replicated anywhere in the world where seagrass meadows are under threat. Costing GB£40,000 [US$52,000], the project is funded by charitable donations and the first of three ocean sites in Wales and England where Project Seagrass plan to restore native seagrasses in coming years.

The project involved volunteer divers harvesting two million donor wild seagrass seeds from extant meadows around the coast of the United Kingdom. The seeds were then planted in biodegradable hessian bags, by volunteers including Welsh schoolchildren, and these bags were launched into the sea at ideal sites off the Pembrokeshire coast. The chief limitation of the project is that native seagrasses take years to reach maturity, making data-gathering on best methods for replanting a slow process. The final seed bags were deployed in December 2020, says Cullen-Unsworth and though it’s early days she’s hopeful.

“We’re already seeing signs of germination,” she says. “It might be five to 10 years before we can absolutely demonstrate evidence of benefits in terms of carbon sequestration and biodiversity support, but still it’s all very exciting.”

Seagrass Ocean Rescue is one of a handful of global projects seeking to reseed lost seagrass meadows, including a 20-year project to restore native eelgrass meadows at Chesapeake Bay in the US and a University of Gothenburg-led project to restore seagrass meadows along Sweden’s West Coast. Cullen-Unsworth believes that this underwater climate hero will soon get the attention it deserves.

“Britons used to be maritime people who were fully aware of marine habits like seagrass and their role in helping ecosystems to thrive. My hope is that seagrass will once again be as appreciated as grasslands and forests.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

The post Saving a Sub-Marine Climate Star appeared first on The Sacred Groves.

Under the azure waters of the Andaman Sea, sturgeon, parrot fish and stingrays swim past a strange new structure close to a coral reef formation. Above, a small solar panel bobs on the water’s surface. This is an artificial reef built by Indian environmental charity ReefWatch. The founders of this tiny non-profit outfit are passionate about the conservation of the magnificent coral atolls in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, training local divers to collect naturally broken coral fragments and implant them on to an artificial metal reef. There is, they soon realised, one basic problem with building new coral reefs: “Coral reefs grow between 0.5-7 cm per year,” says Nayantara Jain, Executive Director of the programme. “At this rate, it will take artificial reefs decades to flourish.”

So ReefWatch implemented a simple, radical strategy to enable coral to grow faster. “We hook our artificial metal reefs to a small floating solar panel,” explains Jain. The mild electric current generated by the floating solar panel helps speed up coral growth by seven to twelve times by enabling faster accretion of calcium carbonate. And the electric current leaves the coral with more of an energy budget that it can use to survive warmer temperature spells and coral disease. Jain and her small team, which includes three local youth, predict these artificial reefs could have a far-reaching impact. Just before the lockdown, the team developed a new solar panel design to make coral accretion even more efficient. With the old accretion system, coral would start re-growing within three months. “Now, perhaps it will grow faster,” Jain says. The team also creates diverse natural habitats under each artificial reef using rocks, shells and aquatic plants. “Consequently, we see an immediate uptick in marine life as soon as the artificial reef is set up,” she says.

In the long term, ReefWatch plans to develop a replicable model for coral reef regeneration which involves local stakeholders. Some of their work involves education: through workshops in schools, colleges and elsewhere, they are spreading awareness about how coral reefs protect the fragile local ecology and bulwark these islands against tsunamis and high tides. “We’re also employing local divers to salvage broken coral and maintain our new reefs,” she says. “Hopefully, this will encourage them and others in their community to look after their habitat.” Jain plans to make the project volunteer tourism-driven and hopes to entice divers and beach enthusiasts to spend some time in these picturesque islands and help build artificial reefs. “If protecting their biodiversity could generate higher tourism revenues,” she says, “the programme could eventually be taken over by the local community entirely, leaving us free to replicate this project elsewhere.”  

ReefWatch has built nine reefs so far, all positioned near natural coral formations. In time, these will mature, merge and support diversity of marine life. Each reef costs around US$2,000 and requires regular maintenance in the first few years of its installation. On World Oceans Day in June 2020, ReefWatch launched the first edition of its Adopt A Reef programme, inviting people to sponsor part of an artificial reef for US$470 per year. Within six weeks, all their existing reefs found sponsors. “The government has now allowed us to work in other areas in the Andaman Islands,” says Jain. “We want to build more reefs now…”

Images Credit: ReefWatch Marine Conservation
Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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