Mriganka Shekhar Sarkar- M.Sc., PGDBT, Ph.D.
- Scientist at G. B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment
Mriganka Shekhar Sarkar
- M.Sc., PGDBT, Ph.D.
- Scientist at G. B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment
About
70
Publications
140,221
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Introduction
Current institution
G. B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment
Current position
- Scientist
Additional affiliations
April 2018 - September 2018
Position
- National Post Doctoral Fellow
Description
- Project Title: Landscape genetics and ecology of major large carnivores in North-East India
December 2019 - present
G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment (An autonomous Institute of Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change, Govt. of India)
Position
- Researcher
Description
- (North East Regional Centre)
April 2019 - December 2019
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- Project Title: Landscape genetics and ecology of major large carnivores in North-East India
Education
August 2013 - May 2017
Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun and Calcutta University, Kolkata
Field of study
- Demographic and genetic correlates of population growth and viability of reintroduced tiger (Panthera tigris) population in Panna landscape, central India
June 2008 - June 2009
March 2005 - March 2007
Publications
Publications (70)
Deforestation poses a significant conservation challenge on a global scale, endangering both plant life and the interconnected animal communities reliant upon it. This loss is primarily propelled by anthropogenic activities, emphasizing the need for meticulous monitoring tools tailored to the intricacies of regional socio-political and cultural dyn...
Ethnomedicine, a holistic approach integrating plants, spirituality, and the natural world, has long served as a fundamental source of healing. In the Eastern Himalaya region, particularly Arunachal Pradesh, medicinal plants play a pivotal role in cultural, spiritual, and healthcare domains. Despite extensive documentation of traditional medicinal...
The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), renowned for its rich biodiversity and cultural diversity, confronts formidable challenges from ongoing climate change, habitat degradation, and human activities. This review-based study reveals the profound vulnerability of the IHR to climate change impacts, including rising temperatures, glacial retreats, and al...
The negative interaction between humans and wildlife in the Indian Himalayas has increased in recent decades. Studies on human-wildlife negative interactions have primarily focused on protected areas. However, research on such interactions is limited in regions like the Indian part of Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL), where wildlife and humans share...
The Indian Himalayan region has a centuries-old beekeeping tradition that thrives due to theabundant biodiversity of the area. In recent times, beekeeping has been a major force behind rural socioeconomic development that supports environmental sustainability and biodiversity. With a focus on Northeast Indian beekeeping, this training handbook offe...
Globally, ecosystems and human health are at risk due to declining river water quality. The current study focuses
on the River Asan, Uttarakhand, which faces significant water quality challenges due to various environmental,
industrial, and domestic factors. This research presents an exhaustive study that intricately blends local community
percepti...
The snowline exhibits significant seasonal shifts upward and downward, reflecting the ever-changing dynamics of the seasons and being influenced by climate variations, which can vary annually. These fluctuations profoundly impact the cryosphere, biota, and ecosystem processes in high mountain regions. Despite the critical role of snowline variation...
Forest fires pose significant challenges by disrupting ecological balance, impacting socio-economic harmony, and raising global concerns. North-East India (NEI) experiences high incidences of forest fires, making it crucial to implement suitable management measures considering the driving forces influencing fire likelihood. This study aims to ident...
Landslide susceptibility mapping plays an imperative role in mitigating hazards and determining the future direction of developmental activities in mountainous regions. Here, we used 518 landslide occurrences and nine landslide-conditioning parameters to build landslide vulnerability models in the Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL), India. Four multiva...
Environmental heterogeneity has a significant role in configuring native species diversity. Studies have shown that agricultural crops impact bird diversity in urban and peri-urban areas. This paper has examined how crop heterogeneity influences avian diversity and its trait composition in India's tropical urban and peri-urban agricultural landscap...
NorthEast India is situated at the tri-junction of the Indo-Chinese, Indian-Malayan, and Indian biogeographical realms. This region is home to a variety of distinct habitat types, rich biodiversity, and a high level of endemism. The area is a biodiversity hotspot and has the highest species richness on the Indian subcontinent. The wildlife of North...
The training manual will cover a primary introductory topic in remote sensing (R.S.) and geographic information system (GIS), their basic concepts, image processing and spectral indices, land use land cover mapping using open-source software, etc. Botany, Zoology and Forestry background students are using this tool intensively to solve many real-ti...
Birds are not only visually appealing but also play a crucial role in ecosystem maintenance. They serve as pollinators, nutrient recyclers, seed dispersers, and pest controllers, contributing to agricultural productivity. Additionally, birds offer aesthetic, symbolic, and spiritual values that are challenging to quantify. Ornithological studies foc...
Habitat fragmentation is a considerable threat to biodiversity worldwide. To minimize the effects of fragmentation, it is important to identify and conserve the existing habitat connections that facilitate dispersal and gene flow among populations. Connected populations are more resilient to the changing environment that affects local populations d...
Land cover information allows us to gauge the impact of human activity on natural landscapes. It is now possible to accurately detect man-made changes in large landscapes using the Google Earth Engine platform. We computed the Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes over the past 30 years in the well-known global biodiversity hotspot, the HI-LIFE landsc...
Protected areas are the cornerstone for biodiversity conservation in present times. Considering this, the post-2020 global biodiversity framework aims to expand the network of protected areas to cover 30% of the earth's terrestrial surface by 2030. For effective biodiversity conservation, it is essential to bring in more areas under protection and...
We conducted a systematic review on the research on mammals in the Far Eastern Himalaya Landscape using the SALSA approach, with a focus on opportunities for cross-border collaboration among India, Myanmar and China. A total of 124 literatures from 1962 to 2021 were identified and reviewed. Over the decades, there has been a steady increase in rese...
Eastern Himalayas are adobe to many species, starting from small insects to large mammals. Namdapha National Park (NNP) falls within the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspot forms one of the most significant blocks of semi-evergreen & evergreen forests in North-East India. Globally, this area has been identified as a high priority landscape for ti...
Simple Summary
The Far-Eastern Himalayan Landscape, a global biodiversity hotspot spread across parts of India, Myanmar, and China, holds great potential for the long-term conservation of tiger populations. National-level efforts aimed at tiger conservation, such as the creation of protected areas, have been critical for the survival of key tiger p...
Dispersal from one population to another is crucial for meta-population stability and survival. Long-distance dispersal events have been widely documented in male tigers (Panthera tigris), but similar events in female tigers are less known. We opportunistically recorded a long-distance dispersal event that ended with the establishment of a new home...
The Himalayan region is one of the global biodiversity hotspots. However, its biodiversity and ecosystems are threatened due to abiotic and biotic drivers. One of the major biotic threats to biodiversity in this region is the rapid spread of Invasive Alien Species (IAS). Natural forests and grasslands are increasingly getting infested by IAS affect...
Conserving landscape connections among favorable habitats is a widely used strategy to maintain populations in an increasingly fragmented world. A species can then exist as a metapopulation consisting of several subpopulations connected by dispersal. Our study focuses on the importance of human–wildlife coexistence areas in maintaining connectivity...
The automation in man-made object extraction such as building habitation from urban area imagery has become a challenging task for photogrammetry, computer vision, and remote sensing. This study aims to automatically extract building of an urban area using high resolution intensity data and fuzzy membership logic to classify the image object by usi...
The tiger is among the world’s most charismatic mega fauna and is of extreme ecological and cultural importance. For conservation, there is hardly a more attractive animal to build flagship- species based programs.
The Bengal tiger occupies a wide range of habitats, from dry deciduous forests to the wet evergreen and swampy mangroves, in partially...
Our analyses explain the largest known female tiger dispersal event and our study also indicates that females plays a vital role in range expansion of existing tiger populations
The ever-increasing human presence in tiger occupied landscapes mandates a better understanding of its effects on the species. The loss of tigers to conflict and poaching have been well established, while the indirect effects of human induced stress have not been widely discussed. Anthropogenic factors have driven tiger populations to extinction in...
In this study, we assess potential habitats and connectivity for the common leopard (Panthera pardus) in the Indian part of the Kailash Sacred Landscape to predict suitable areas for future dispersal within the landscape. We used a modeling-based approach, which incorporates sixteen landscape variables to identify priority areas for leopard conserv...
Effective quantification of land cover changes remains a challenge in Himalayan hills and mountains, and has a colossal value addition for natural resource management. Here we present a new robust method for classifying land cover vegetation at physiognomic scale along steep elevational gradients from ~ 200 to ~ 7000 masl in the Kailash Sacred Land...
Pindari glacier is the source to Pindar River, one of the major tributary to the River Alaknanda. This study aims to assess the retreat of the Pindari glacier in four decades using visual interpretation of remote sensing data. The GPS technology (coordinates) was used to determine the latest snout position in 2014. The location of snout was marked...
Background
. Large carnivores influence ecosystem functions at various scales. Thus,
their local extinction is not only a species-specific conservation concern, but also reflects
on the overall habitat quality and ecosystem value. Species-habitat relationships at fine
scale reflect the individuals’ ability to procure resources and negotiate intrasp...
Supporting data
Table S1: Background information on the tigers and telemetry data used for fine scale-habitat selection analyses (F: female, M: male, W: wild, SW: Semi wild, a: GPS fixes, b: Location collected through VHF telemetry).
Supporting data
Table S2: Bivariate correlations of ecological and geographical variables used in K select analysis and habitat suitability modeling using Mahalanobis distance probability function. All values depict the Pearson correlation coefficients.
Figure S1: The continuous scale of habitat suitability map generated from Mahalanobish D2 method...
Difficult terrain and inclement weather limit our knowledge of large predators, such as the tiger Panthera tigris , in the Himalayas. A lack of empirical data on large carnivores can lead to mismanagement of protected areas and population declines. We used non-invasive genetic and remote sensing data to inform the management of such high-altitude p...
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL 1 Detailed methodology for spatial data analysis Land Use Land Cover (LULC) classification We used a LANDSAT 8 satellite image (image ID: LC81380422013349LGN00) for Land Use Land Cover classification of Buxa Tiger Reserve (Fig. 1). A false colour composite map was initially classified by an unsupervised classification techniq...
Aim
Effective conservation of the endangered tiger depends upon reliable knowledge of factors driving genetic differentiation and population connectivity. Connectivity models frequently use resistance surfaces not optimized with actual movement or genetic data which limits reliability. Our aim is to use empirical data on genetic diversity of tiger...
Reintroduction of the tiger (Panthera tigris) has become imperative to address the extinction crisis and, it also provides new knowledge of the species biology as to how these animals explore and utilize new environments. We studied six reintroduced tigers and three of their offsprings in Panna Tiger Reserve, central India, focusing on exploration...
Context
Connectivity models for animal movement frequently use resistance surfaces, but rarely incorporate actual movement data and multiple scale drivers of landscape resistance.
Objectives
Using GPS data, we developed a multi-scale model of landscape resistance for tiger (Panthera tigris) dispersal in central India and evaluated the performance,...
Translocations of large carnivores like tiger to restore extirpated populations are increasingly becoming important conservation tools in the face of persistent anthropogenic pressures and relentless habitat loss. Reintroduction success in Panna Tiger Reserve, India was variously attributed to high genetic diversity, less anthropogenic disturbance...
There is growing recognition of several important roles played by tigers for maintaining sustainable biodiversity at diverse ecosystems in South and SouthEast Asia. Only <3200 individuals are left in the wild because of poaching and habitat loss. Thus, restoring wild population is an emerging as well as important conservation initiative, but such e...
Tiger populations are dwindling rapidly making it increasingly difficult to study their dispersal and mating behaviour in the wild, more so tiger being a secretive and solitary carnivore.
We used non-invasively obtained genetic data to establish the presence of 28 tigers, 22 females and 6 males, within the core area of Pench tiger reserve, Madhya P...
Tiger, being a solitary and territorial animal, often tends to move out of protected areas into the surrounding forests. This is especially true in the case of sub-adult animals leading to escalating conflicts and deaths in the surrounding human-dominated landscapes. Unless adequately protected against various human activities, such corridors and s...
Questions
Questions (8)
I would like to prepare a GENIND OBJECT using poppr package in R. The starting microsatellite genotype data are in raw format encoded in .xls with column heads are as follows: Sample ID, Latitude, Longitude, population names, Sub population names, LocusA1, LocusA2, LocusB1, LocusB2, LocusC1, LocusC2 etc. All these strata and marker information should be stored in GENIND or any other supportive file for further analysis.
In following example, how to use several combination of X, Y and Z in each model?
The dataframe looks similar to the following sequence, where Pa = 0/1 and X1 to Zn = several ranges of continuous variables.
Pa ~ X1 +X2+X3+X4+ …..Xn + Y1+Y2+Y3+Y4…..Yn + Z1+Z2+Z3+Z4…….Zn
Model sequences are following:
Model1: Pa~ X1 + Y1+ Z1
Model3: Pa~ X2 + Y1+ Z1
Model4: Pa~ X3 + Y1+ Z1
Model5: Pa~ X4 + Y1+ Z1
.
.
.
Model n: Pa~ Xn + Yn+ Zn
How to distinguish between swamps/marshes from cropland and grassland with using LANDSAT-8 data? Is there any index to find out only swampy or marshy lands?
Can I calculate it in any one of the following platform : ArcMAP/ERDAS IMAGINE/R/ MATLAB/PYTHON environment please also mention.
Or
Do high resolution open source global land cover data available online that has swamps/marshes as one of the land cover class?
'UNICOR is intended for use by land managers as well as the research community and will be a valuable tool for the study of conservation biology, by increasing our understanding of species connectivity in fragmenting future landscapes.' It's a python based stand-alone programme. Is it possible to use the programme to execute run simulation in R?
Hi folks, I am handling large spatial data sets (around 15GB raster files) in R. For any kind of computation (running programme) R shows an error message 'cannot allocate vector of size ---GB.' I know it is a problem of RAM size of the PC as R use RAM memory for computation of any analysis by default. However, is there any other alternative process to solve this issue without increasing the RAM of a computer?
Prediction capability of Species Distribution Models are generally measured through ‘Area Under Curve (AUC)’ using training data sets. I have developed four distribution models of my study species. All models are in raster format. Training data sets are exact GPS locations of the species. Can anyone help me! How to create AUC using R commands? Which R package can be used? Please share your R codes if available!
Is there any negative effect of reintroduction in general? Can anyone explain positive means of general species reintroduction?
