All of this will require sustained multipronged and multi-disciplinary research and no one institute has or will have the capacity,” said Anurag Danda, who leads the Sundarbans chapter of WWF-India, credited with conducting the first successful camera trap exercise in the Indian Sundarbans in 2012.Īrjan Basu Roy of Nature Mates, a Kolkata-based NGO that’s working on butterflies in eastern and north-eastern India, said good research work is scattered across the country. We will have to find ways to accommodate tigers outside the designated protected areas and manage habitats. “After half a century of concerted tiger conservation, it is time to look beyond tigers. ![]() From Wildlife Trust of India’s (WTI) work on India’s elephant corridors, and WWF-India’s projects on central India tiger corridors, to Aaranyak’s research on manelephant conflict in north-east India - detailed field work has redefined the approach towards wildlife conservation in India, shifting the focus also to habitat management. However, the widening ambit of research work has made forest departments look beyond and work with other NGOs, research organisations and even grass-roots bodies to focus on issues such as tiger migration routes, elephant corridors, lesser-known species and even insects, to get an overall idea of the health of the ecosystem. A central institute like Wildlife Institute of India ( WII), Dehradun, has been instrumental in bringing out the tiger and leopard estimation reports once every four years. Research work over the years - even though focussed on tigers - has brought to light the need to widen their ambit and look beyond tigers to focus on other issues. Similarly, a camera trap exercise taken up more than a decade ago by WWF-India in the Indian Sundarbans to track tiger numbers captured a rare melanistic leopard cat, probably the first in India. ![]() A DNA analysis of the tiger’s tissue samples, performed 1,000 kilometres away in Bengaluru’s National Centre for Biological Sciences, revealed that it had probably travelled from the Central Indian landscape, renewing hope about possible tiger migration routes between Central India and Bengal. ![]() Experts feel the presence of multiple NGOs and institutions should lead to more diverse research work and look at conservation of habitats rather than only umbrella species The tiger in southern West Bengal’s Lalgarh may have been poached, but in its death it had left some key findings. Project Tiger drove most of the research in wildlife for the last few decades, but other creatures and topics are now getting much-needed attention.
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