While Protected Areas (PAs) make up less than five per cent of country’s total area, wildlife conservation should focus on securing wildlife corridors to maintain connectivity. A study developed by researchers of Wildlife Conservation Society, University of Florida, Wildlife Trust of India and Yale University focuses on animal dispersal patterns based on data on animal movement. The concept is based on identifying existing, often degraded forests that physically connect two PA’s, and securing these corridors.
The new study has found inadequacies in current approaches to identify potential movement routes for animals in a landscape between forests. The research paper, titled “From dispersal constraints to landscape connectivity: lessons from species distribution modeling”, points out that the basis of these models should be based on data collected by animal movement or dispersal. Surprising as it may seem, this, in practice, is often neglected, it said.
The study provides fresh perspectives to the contemporary concept of connectivity, or corridors, between forests to save tigers and other wildlife, researchers now stress on broadening the people’s understanding of ‘connectivity’ to address challenges of conservation effectively. The study suggests learning from the animals themselves to identify their potential dispersal routes. It also calls for increasing conservation toolkit to include appropriate new interventions, rather than limiting ourselves to just existing or demarcated forest corridors. According to the study, the new view will help develop innovative connectivity strategies as it advocates thinking beyond the typically-used thread-like ‘wildlife corridors’ for allowing animal movement. Methods have been developed for modelling animal dispersal through focus on identifying where animals move.
“Animals do not exclusively seek and use corridors demarcated by humans to move across landscapes. In reality, we know that tigers, elephants and other animals use fields, plantations and other human-modified lands for movement in addition to corridors. Hence, what is required is to better understand what allows animals to move and what hinders them - conservation strategies that emerge from this understanding will be more effective and more sustaining,” says Divya Vasudev, the lead author of the paper.