The Western Ghats run down the western edge of India, and they are not tall mountains but they are decisive ones: they intercept the southwest monsoon and wring it out, and everything about peninsular India, its rivers, its agriculture, its climate, follows from that. They are older than the Himalaya and far richer biologically, holding rainforest, shola-grassland mosaics on the high plateaus, and an extraordinary concentration of endemic amphibians and fish.
Elephants and tigers move through these forests, and the Nilgiri tahr climbs the cliffs of the high shola country. The range has been fragmented by tea and coffee plantations, by dams, and by roads, and the corridors between the forest blocks are now the critical thing: elephants need to move, and where they cannot, they come into conflict with people, and people and elephants both die.
The organizations here secure those elephant corridors, restore shola forest and the grasslands between, and defend a range that supplies water to a substantial share of India and is treated, too often, as scenery.
Environmental Organizations in This Bioregion
2 organizations working across this landscape.
Applied Environmental Research Foundation
AERF is conservation non-profit engaged in achieving conservation on the ground using scientific approaches and through multi-stake holder partnership in India.