Conserving Wildlife through Landscape Ecology

chillibreeze writer — Karthik

Landscape ecology may have unofficially amalgamated many decades ago when an ecologist got on an airplane, probably took an aerial photograph and marvelled at the practical applications of this. Formally, the geographer Troll coined the term ‘landscape ecology’ about seven decades ago and pointed out its use in understanding ecological cause-and-effect in a landscape. Definitively, landscape ecology is described in several ways in a useful book by Turner and others, however generically it has been defined in Wikipedia as “the science and art of studying and improving the relationship between spatial pattern and ecological processes on a multitude of scales and organizational levels”. This is a giant step beyond aerial photography the uses of which are limited to documenting patterns. Landscape ecology can be used to further determine causes of patterns at different temporal as well as spatial scales.

The first practical application that landscape ecology was put to was perhaps by the ecologist Romme in understanding fire-history and its effects on plant diversity of the Yellowstone National Park, about three decades ago. In India, landscape ecology is still a nascent field of study and was put to practice little more than a decade ago. In this article, I limit myself to describing the practice of landscape ecology in wildlife and forest conservation, although the field decrees practical applications in several other fields. Here, I provide five instances of landscape ecology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) being used in wildlife and habitat conservation projects in India.

1. Large mammals, due to their large home ranges (for instance, elephants home ranges: 30–160 km² for females and 53–345 km² for males) are most vulnerable to forest loss and fragmentation. The Wildlife Trust of India, in collaboration with the World Land Trust has identified 88 corridors for elephants in India using GIS and recommends that these corridors can improve connectivity between fragments of forests, provide passage for the pachyderms and therefore can mitigate human-elephant conflict across the country. However, noted ecologist Dr. Sukumar has pointed out that these corridors need to be ground-truthed and the status of the corridors needs to be evaluated.

2. Using GIS and extensive ground-truthing, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) has prepared an ecosystem profile of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot which primarily aims to identify areas of high biodiversity conservation significance. In addition to this, the ecosystem profile also aims to identify existing institutional frameworks in the landscape and align it towards conservation. This is an ideal example of landscape ecology being applied in both biodiversity as well as a social context.

3. In a similar example, researchers at Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) have combined the use of topographic maps to identify human footprint parameters such as roads, railways and human settlements and ground-truthing which involves the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) to identify existing animal routes to prioritise sites that should be acquired to improve forest connectivity in the State of Tamil Nadu.

4. Instances of practice of landscape ecology from north-east India which is also rich in biodiversity are few. Shaily Menon and others, used GIS and human population trends and associated disturbances to project future forest loss in the State of Arunachal Pradesh. They determined that by the year 2021, half of the forests recorded from the State in the year 1988 will be lost. They concluded that 76 % of deforestation will occur in areas not legally protected and outline sensitive areas that should be protected and also identify areas of relatively low-conservation potential. In a similar example from Western Ghats, Jha and others from the National Remote Sensing Agency estimated forest cover change over two decades between the 70s and 90s and estimated a forest loss of about 25.6 % in the Western Ghats. These estimated rates are higher than those recorded by the Forest Survey of India and may present more realistic deforestation rates; open forest had higher losses (33.2 %) than dense forest (19.5 %) due to conversion for agricultural fields and plantations.

5. Another landscape ecology oriented research from Andaman & Nicobar Islands focused on correlations between vegetation distribution and satellite imagery-derived landscape attributes. The findings can be summarised as follows: a) Forests in Nicobar Islands are less anthropogenically-disturbed and fragmented than Andaman Islands, b) evergreen and semi-evergreen forests characterise Andaman Islands, whereas mixed evergreen, lowland swamp and grasslands characterise the Nicobar Islands. The researchers also conclude that this sort of analysis can be relatively more rapid than analyses based on just extensive ground sampling.

Landscape ecology provides opportunities for new approaches to contemporary ecological research and can be considered as a panacea for wildlife conservation. In an era in which deforestation is occurring at unprecedented scales, landscape ecology can bolster wildlife research by providing insights into forest loss at previously unrecorded spatial as well as temporal scales. Every year technology is also on the rise; we now have GPS units that can record locations at an error-radius of less than 3 m (Garmin e-trex legend), satellite imagery (IKONOS satellite) that can classify locations within a radius of 1 m (one may be able to tell a pothole on a road from an eye in the sky!), and computers than can speedily analyse collected data. So, landscape ecology can be David’s staff and sling to compete with Goliath’s armour and shield-bearer if Goliath can be imagined to be partaking in deforestation!

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