The focus of this programme is to undertake scientific research on wildlife and use the outputs to steer conservation interventions in the Western Ghats. Over the last few decades we have been actively undertaking research and conservation interventions in the Agastyamalai-Periyar landscape and we have continued our efforts to fortify this program in this region in the last year as well.
In the year gone by, FERAL implemented three projects under this programme. The first project was a continuation of our research efforts on threatened arboreal mammals. This project is a comparative study of the ecology and distribution of the two colobine monkeys in the southern Western Ghats, to determine the ecological factors that determine their distributional range and identify factors that helps maintain their common boundary.
The project on payment for ecosystem services approach to conservation in the Shencottah gap was continued. In this project,
a) we have identified potential corridors in the Shencottah gap based on data from intensive field surveys using an occupancy approach,
b) in the first of its kind initiative in India, we are developing mechanisms to make direct payments to individuals rather than community payments for specific efforts taken towards improving wildlife habitats in the identified corridor, and
c) this effort also includes drawing up of protocols for monitoring the impact of the interventions taken by the local farmer-participants in the PES programme and documenting the initiative for implementing a PES of this kind in other parts of India.
There are several institutions and organisations that have collected data over several decades - unfortunately the bulk of this is unavailable to the larger research community, policy makers and to the public. In a pioneering effort, FERAL collaborated with two other large organisations (French Institute, Pondicherry and Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment, Bangalore), in collating the data available with these institutions to create a spatially explicit baseline dataset to facilitate conservation planning in the Western Ghats. This database was used by the Western Ghats Ecology experts panel and will eventually find its way on various open access portals including the Western Ghats Biodiversity portal, thus setting up a platform and policy framework that will allow organisations to share data, while retaining copyrights over their datasets.