4 DECCAN HERALD Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Spectrum environment FLOWERS & BEESNew research has revealed for thefirst time that flower-rich habitatsare key to enhancing the survivalof bumblebee families.

ThebiodiversityofKarnatakaisof-ten represented by depicting theWestern Ghats and the tigers.While the importance of bothcannot be undermined, there is

also the 320-km-long coastline that thestate boasts of, with its magnificent rivers,lagoons, bay areas, creeks, and beaches. Itis amidst this habitable conglomeration ofsalinewatersfromtheseasandfreshwaterfrom the rivers, where the mangroves, thefloating forests, thrive. These forests maynot be as magnanimous as the more fa-mousmangroveecosystemofeasternIndia,the Sunderbans. However, the mangrovepatches of Karnataka are a veritable spec-tacle, proving their worth through the eco-logical good they are bringing to the area,and the growing economic value.

Some of the best locations to find man-grovesinKarnatakaareSwarna,Sita,Kodi,Gangoli, Aghanashini and Kali rivers, andtowards the mouth of Haladi-Chakra-Kol-lur rivers. As the rivers and several smallrivulets originating from the WesternGhatsmaketheirwaytowardstheArabianSea,theinterplayofthesaltyseawaterandthe fresh river water comes into play. Thehabitat thus becomes congenial for man-grove swamps to develop with around 14species of mangroves known to grow inthe coastal zones of Karnataka.

The green wallThings were, however, not the same adecade ago. The coasts of Karnataka didhavemangroves,buttheyweresparse.ThenumbersweresoinsignificantthattheFor-est Survey of India missed recording themangroves entirely while monitoring theecological wealth of the state some yearsago. Then began the ‘green wall’ projectby the Forest Department in 2008. Delib-erately, location after location on thecoastal belt, the department and locals be-gan planting the sturdy shrubs that areknown world over as the natural coastalguards. According to the department sta-tistics, more than 800 hectares in the es-tuarine area were brought under man-grove plantations this way. Now they havegrown into full-fledged forests.

In a paper published in the journal Geo-physics & Remote Sensing (2014), it wasfound that the planned plantation by theKarnatakaForestDepartmenthadindeedreaped rewards. Satellite imagery showedthattheStatehadabundantmangrovesys-tems spread over the coastal districts.Whilemangrovesweredeclininginseveralparts of the world because of timber har-vesting and pollution, they were in fact in-creasing in Karnataka.

Theresearchers,TVRamachandra,pro-fessor with Indian Institute of Science, andBharath Setturu found that at the conflu-enceoffourrivers,Aghanashini,Gangavali,Sharavati and Venkatapura with the Ara-bian Sea, there was a long stretch of man-groveslocallyknownastheKandlaorSun-dari.Udupi,DakshinaKannadaandUttaraKannada also have a dense vegetation ofmangroves that act as a green wall for thecoasts. “The rejuvenation owes entirely tolocal conservation efforts, both by forestofficials and communities, in reforestationand protection,” said Ramachandra, thelead author of the research paper.

Through a December 2016 study map-pingthemangrovesofUttaraKannadadis-trict with the use of remote sensing im-

the reju-venation

owes entirelyto localconservationefforts, bothby forestofficials andcommunities,in reforestationand protection...

A watchful eyeon wildlifehiGh Above Africa is in the midst of a poachingcrisis. Now, conservationists are testing drones tohelp track and stop poachers in the continent,reports rachel Nuwer

Night has fallen at Liwonde NationalPark in Malawi, but the trespassersare clearly visible. Three hundred

feet in the air, a thermal camera attachedto a BatHawk drone tracks their boat, ablack sliver gliding up the luminous grayShire river. “They’re breaking the law bycoming into the park,” said AntoinetteDudley, one of the drone’s operators,pointing to her computer screen. Morethan two miles from the boat, she and herpartner, Stephan De Necker, are seated ina Land Cruiser that serves as their com-mand centre. A monitor attached to thedriver’sseat displays the drone’svitals,andanother behind the passenger’s seatstreams live video from the camera, oper-atedwithanoldPlayStationconsole.“Let’sgive them a scare,”said Stephan. With thetap of a few keys, he switches on thedrone’s navigation lights and sends it beel-ining towards the boat. The reaction is in-stantaneous: The boat makes a U-turn,high-tailing it out of the park.

Africa is in the midst of a profoundpoaching crisis: The continent’s elephantpopulation declined by 30% from 2007-2014, much of it because of poaching. Atleast 1,338 rhinos were killed for theirhorns in 2015 alone. Criminals are becom-ing increasingly militarised in their tactics,and efforts to stop them have had littlesuccess. In August 2015, the Malawi De-partment of National Parks enlisted thehelp of African Parks, a non-profit thatspecialises inrehabilitatingstrugglingpro-tected areas. Since taking over operationsin Liwonde, the group has confiscated up-ward of 18,000 illegal snares, made over100 arrests, installed more than 60 milesof electric fencing and removed 261 ele-phants to another reserve.

Using drones to trackBut African Parks also has embarked onan unusual high-tech experiment, callingin a drone team from South Africa. Withfunding from the World Wildlife Fund(WWF), including a $5 million grant fromGoogle, drones are being tested in the firstsystematic evaluation of their potential tocombat poachers. UAV & Drone Solutions(UDS), the company that employs An-toinette and Stephan, is the first licenseddrone operator in Africa, a certificationthat permits the company to fly drones upto 15 miles away and to operate at night —crucial advantages, given that the vast ma-jority of poachers are active after dark andfew parks are able to carry out effectivenocturnal patrols.

Conservationists failed to do the home-work needed to see if drones were suitablefor their needs, said Nir Tenenbaum, di-rector of Wildeas, a conservation technol-ogy consultancy. “So many groups wanttechnology to solve all their problems, butusually they don’t understand the tech,”he

said. Government officials haven’t helped.In Namibia, trial flights and training un-dertaken by the WWF, supported by theGooglegrant,werecutshortwhenthegov-ernmentsuspendedtheuseofdrones.Oth-er nations have banned unmanned aerialvehiclesentirelyorhavestrictlylimitedtheiruse.Onlyrecentlyhasthatbeguntochange.In 2015, South Africa established some ofthefirstformaldronelegislation,andothercountries have started making limited ex-ceptions for their use.

The Lindbergh Foundation’s Air Shep-herd programme, along with the SouthAfrica-based Peace Parks Foundation andthe WWF’s Google grant, have coveredabout half UDS’ $100,000 monthly oper-ationalcosts.Despitetheseresources,OttoWerdmuller Von Elgg, the company’s co-founder, has discovered that drones arefarfromtheblanketsolutioneveryonehadhoped for. “I am convinced that we areonto something, but we’re only beginningto understand how this tool can be usedeffectively,” he said. “The challenge nowis determining how we integrate dronesinto existing anti-poaching operations.”

Challenges aheadSo far, no arrests of poachers have beenmade solely based on drone surveillance,and pilots have spotted poachers only ahandful of times. Drone teams often don’tget ground support in the form of rangersable to follow up on leads, and must fre-quently fly without guidance on wherepoachers might be, according to Otto.Data analysis has also been a challenge.Currently, drone operators must watchlive video feed to detect intruders and it isall too easy to miss the poachers. “It couldbenumerousreasons—theoperator looksaway for 20 seconds, or goes to grab a cupof coffee and misses it,” said Cedric Coet-zee, general manager for rhino securityat Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife inSouth Africa.

Perhapsthebiggestchallengeisthatcon-servationists do not know how to most ef-fectively put anti-poaching drones to use,because there have been no rigorous long-term evaluations. South Africa’s Councilfor Scientific and Industrial Research con-ducted a two-month trial with UDS andconcludedthatthetechnologyis“aremark-able support tool,” but officials have yet torelease the data supporting those findings.

Most evidence supporting drones is an-ecdotal: Cedric said he has seen a signifi-cant reduction in park incursions whenand where drones fly, but added that otherfactors could have been at play. Dronesmay deter trespassers, he said, but theymay simply go elsewhere in the reserve.WWF plans to tease out the answers tothese questions by evaluating the drones’effectivenessagainstpoachers inLiwonde.The New York Times

agery, by Energy and Wetlands ResearchGroup,CentreofEcologicalSciences,ato-tal of 1119.73 hectares of mangrove areaand 1786.75 hectares potential area wereregistered.

Ecological & economical boostIn Aghanashini estuary, mangroves grewby four per cent between 1989 and 2010.In the Gangavali estuarine region, man-groves went up from 48.77% to 51.59% inthe same time frame. The paper also esti-matedthevalueofanestuaryas$19120perhectare per year if all ‘goods and services’are taken into account. The changes ob-servedinthecoastalareas,ecologicallyandeconomically, prove that this estimation isnot wrong. Mangroves with their mesh ofstilt roots appear like a plant with severalfingers dipped in water and holding it inplace. It is truly this elaborate root systemthat gives the mangroves the ability to notjust remain steadfast in a largely looseground underneath, but also withstandthe daily rigours of rising and falling tide.Mangroveforestsget floodedat least twicea day and this root system ensures thatthe force of the water is broken when ittouches the shores. This prevents soil ero-sion, and also prevents coasts from severestorms and coastal damage.

“The mangroves grow in saline water.To shed salinity in their system, they shedleaves rapidly and give out new leaves thatmake them evergreen. The leaves fall intothe water and become organic manure. Tofacilitate this process, trees have to ingestcarbon rapidly and give out oxygen. Thisgives them the name carbon sink,” says VN Nayak, director, Sub-regional Science

Centre at Karwar and member of the Kar-nataka state environmental report com-mittee 2011. In simpler terms, the carbonstorage capacity of one sq km of mangroveis equivalent to 50 sq km of tropical forest,thusprovidingmuchbetterwayofcontain-ingcarbonreleasedtotheatmospherewithrelatively smaller area of a forest.

With global warming threatening theplanet, this has huge implications on whyeven a single square kilometre of man-grove matters. For the aquatic organisms,mangroves are like nurturers, not justpro-viding a safe haven for fish, oysters, crabsand other organisms, but acting as crècheand nurseries for them. The fishing indus-try is also heavily dependent on the man-groves for the same reason.

For Karnataka, what has come as anadded surprise is the addition of anothereconomicadvantageduetothemangroves— the growing popularity of mangrovetourism. Mangrove tourists are those wholove to spend their time near these ecosys-tems or take a boat ride just to catch aglimpseoftheeasytospotavianandaquat-ic fauna in the area. Karwar and Ullal area couple of spots that are giving people achance to do just that.

Marine resourcesA boat ride away from Sadashivgadh inKarwar is an island where the Forest De-partment had planted mangroves a fewyears back. The fishermen here call it theDevara Kadu (sacred groves), and they arehappy that the department has taken ef-forts to restore the mangroves, which theythemselves could not because of the logis-tics and finances involved. Through an-cient wisdom, the locals knew that man-groves are crucial to safeguard them fromthe wrath of the seas as well as to provideabundant marine resources.

However, high degree of human im-pacts through centuries, which includedreclamation of estuaries for rice and co-conutcultivation,expansionofhumanset-tlements,shrimpfarming,saltproduction,shell and sand mining, and cutting for fueland timber degraded the mangroveecosystem throughout Karnataka. If thetideshaveturnednow, it ishopefullybring-ing a better understanding to ascertainthat the floating forests continue to guardand bring prosperity to the region.

reviving the naturalcoastal guardsforests of the tide recent research indicates that mangroves have increasedin coastal Karnataka over the past few years. Atula Gupta explains the reasons forthis positive development

With enough determination,money and smarts, scientists justmight revive the woolly mam-

moth, or some version of it, by splicinggenes from ancient mammoths into Asianelephant DNA. The ultimate dream is togenerate a sustainable population ofmammoths that can once again roam thetundra. But here’s a sad irony to ponder:What if that dream came at the expenseof today’s Asian and African elephants,whose numbers are quickly dwindlingbecause of habitat loss and poaching? “In50 years, we might not have thoseelephants,” said Joseph Bennett, an assis-tant professor and conservation re-searcher at Carleton University, Canada.Joseph has spent his career asking hardquestions about conservation priorities.With only so much funding to go around,deciding which species to save can be agame of triage.

Recently, he and a team of colleagues

confronted a new question: If molecularbiologists can potentially reconstruct ex-tinct species, such as the woolly mam-moth, should society devote its limited re-sources to reversing past wrongs, or onpreventing future extinctions?

In a paper published in Nature Ecology& Evolution this month, the researchersconcluded that the biodiversity costs andbenefits seldom come out in favour of de-extinction. “If you have the millions of dol-lars it would take to resurrect a speciesand choose to do that, you are making anethical decision to bring one species backand let several others go extinct,” Josephsaid. “It would be one step forward, andthree to eight steps back.”

But his team’s findings do not fully res-onate with all scientists. Some who are en-gaged in de-extinction efforts say thatJoseph’s analysis, and others like it, aretoofarremovedfromactualdevelopmentsin the field. One leading group in the field

Protect elephants or bring back the mammoth?

is Revive & Restore, a non-profit initiativeto rescue extinct and endangered speciesthrough genetic engineering and biotech-nology.

There could be ecological benefits ofrestoring lost species, said Ben Novak, theRevive & Restore’s lead researcher andscience consultant. In some cases, he said,living species are endangered partlybecause of “the lack of an ecological part-ner or some link in the food web.”“Any de-extinction effort must have long-term benefits that outweigh the costs,”Ben said.

Working out the costsDe-extinction may certainly have long-term gains, Joseph acknowledged, but hefears they are a luxury the world cannotafford. By some estimates, 20% of specieson Earth face extinction, and that may riseto 50% by the end of the century. In theirstudy, Joseph and his collaborators triedto approximate the costs of re-establishingand maintaining 16 species that went ex-tinct in the last millennium, including theLord Howe pigeon and Eastern rat-kan-

AT WHAT COST? Researchers haveanalysed the cost of re-establishing andmaintaining 16 species.

AERIAL VIEW Drones (inset) offer an opportunity to track poachers in the darkand carry out effective nocturnal patrols in national parks. REPRESENTATIVE IMAGES

garoo from Australia. The researchers se-lected these animals because they couldestimate what it would cost to conservethem based on proposed government ex-penditures to save similar living speciesthat are endangered.

Based on the price of conserving the en-dangered Chatham Island warbler fromNew Zealand, for instance, they deter-mined that managing a new populationof theextinct Chatham bellbird would cost$360,000 in the first year. Because theprice of genetically reconstructing extinctspecies is still unknown, the scientists fo-cused on how much it would cost just toreintroduce and maintain these particularspecies in the wild once they had been en-gineered.InNewZealand, theresearcherscalculated, the funds required to conserve11 extinct species would protect threetimes as many living species.

The problem with this analysis, saidStewartBrand,co-founderofRevive&Re-

FLOATING FORESTS After 2008, more than 800 hectares in the estuarine area of Karnataka were broughtunder mangrove plantations; (below) a patch of mangrove forest at River Aghanashini. PHOTOS BY RAJESH K C, DH

store, is that “these are all species thatwould never be considered seriouslyfor de-extinction in the first place,” eitherbecause their ecological roles can beapproximated by another living species orbecause the benefits of restoring them arenot great enough to warrant the costs.

Joseph said, “He wouldn’t want to closethe door on de-extinction forever.”Theremay be some instances where it is worth-while, he acknowledged, and pursuing itwill advance research on genetic tech-nologies. “If someone wants to work onde-extinction because it’s technicallyfascinating, that’s fine,” he said. “But ifthe person is couching de-extinction interms of conservation, then she or heneeds to have a very sober look at whatone could do with those millions of dollarswith living species — there’s alreadyplenty to do.”Steph YinThe New York Times