Road widening and related disturbance along with increasing tourism in the Valparai region of the Anamalai hills, has serious negative impacts on several endangered and endemic fauna, road-kill and habitat disruption for endangered and endemic fauna of the Western Ghats from lion-tailed macaques to amphibians and reptiles. This project explores wildlife mortality and crossing points along roads to identify mitigation and management measures.

How can one extend the reach of conservation into landscapes outside protected areas? Conservationists around the world are now working to extend conservation to such landscapes, especially lands under productive agriculture and plantations, by linking production with the market for products certified as coming from farms that follow sustainable and ecologically-friendly practices.

Scattered fragments of tropical rainforest amidst vast monoculture plantations, a high density of people, and a host of endangered, endemic wildlife—this is the Valparai plateau of the Anamalai hills in Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot. Keeping in mind the fragile ecosystem, conflict between people and wildlife, and the need for broad-based conservation awareness, we spearheaded a conservation education programme, beginning in 2007.

The Nicobar Islands are biologically unique as they encompass a variety of ecosystems. Indigenous islanders extract natural resources using traditional systems of ownership and management. The overall aim of this project is to understand the influence of post-tsunami change on cooperative behaviour and sharing of natural resources amongst these indigenous communities, from the perspective of conservation and management of natural resources.

Quantifying the response of the reef ecosystem to the 1998 bleaching event at local and regional scales is an important component of this project. The first component of the project aims to draw a broad picture of the variability in reef responses to mass bleaching. To this end, we are using rapid techniques to examine the current status of the benthic (coral, algae, and the diverse sessile fauna that thrive on reefs) and fish communities across the Lakshadweep Islands. A patchy picture emerges from the initial analysis, with some reefs recovering well after the bleaching, with thriving coral and fish communities, and others moribund and not showing many signs of recovery.

Coral reefs are highly effective canaries of global change. Thriving in the warm waters of the tropics, hard corals respond rapidly to unusual fluctuations in oceanic temperature by bleaching white. In recent times, extensive mass bleaching and coral mortality has been reported from reefs in all tropical oceans, apparently triggered by severe El Niño events. Our work in in understand this phenomenon as focused on the Lakshdweep island reefs.

Can a complex and biologically diverse forest, once destroyed by human action, ever be brought back to its original state? When forests are in a relatively undisturbed state, it is best to leave them as they are rather than disturb them in the belief that they can be brought back or restored. Nevertheless, there are forests already degraded or destroyed where there is a strong case for restoration efforts, like here in the Anamalai hills.