Vikram Aditya

Centre for Wildlife Studies

What do herpetofauna do for us? This question is hardly ever asked because a thorough evaluation of their role in ecosystems has not yet been completed. The adverse environmental impacts of increasing agricultural intensification have put the spotlight on the role that resident predator populations can play in improving crop health through biologic...

India’s Eastern Ghats mountain region, spread across Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu states, is predominantly inhabited by several forest-dwelling tribal communities who have distinct lifestyles and livelihoods linked to the forested landscape. Most of the Northern Eastern Ghats (NEG) is placed under the 5th Schedule [u...

Roads passing through protected areas are a major barrier to wildlife movement, their spatiotemporal activity patterns, species interactions and habitat use. Roads can thus impact larger ecological processes, with long term consequences for ecosystems. Varying intensities of traffic movement at different hours of the day can varyingly impact mammal...

Roads form a major barrier to wildlife movement and are known to affect natural habitats and biodiversity. The Nagarjunasagar Srisailam Tiger Reserve (NSTR), situated in the Nallamala hills in the central Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh, covers an area close to 4000 sq km and is India's largest tiger reserve. This protected area is rich in biodiver...

Tropical forests experience high levels of anthropogenic pressure from human activities for the collection of forest products, hunting, and movement of domestic animals that affect circadian temporal activity patterns of mammals. Areas with different protection statuses might show differences in mammal circadian activity because of variation in hum...

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundr...

Recent studies have linked COVID-19 induced restrictions to an increase in wildlife crime, with severe yet unknown implications for severely threatened taxa like pangolins. We analyze publicly available online seizure reports involving pangolins across India before (2018–2019) and during the pandemic (March–August 2020), using a longitudinal study...

Farmlands and farm practices are increasingly getting homogenised due to the all-pervasive intensification of agriculture. Often blurred in this production maximising system is the biodiversity in and around farms—both wilderness and agricultural—that dots farm neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, unlike biodiversity associated with more recognisable lan...

Pangolins are the most trafficked animals globally. Although the Indian pangolin Manis crassicaudata occurs across the Indian subcontinent (excluding parts of the Himalayas and the north-east, where the Chinese pangolin Manis pentadactyla is present), it is categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List as a result of heavy poaching for its meat an...

The Honey Badger or Ratel is a monotypic species of the badger family Mustelidae ranging across Africa and Asia at low densities. There have been no records of their presence and distribution across the Eastern Ghats of India. The present note reports the first camera trap record of the Honey Badger Mellivora capensis Schreber, 1776 from the reserv...

The northern Eastern Ghats is an area with significant biodiversity value but remains poorly explored except for a few charismatic taxa such as birds, mammals and reptiles. Very few studies have looked at the invertebrate diversity of these hill ranges, particularly butterflies. We present the first peer-reviewed checklist of butterflies from the n...

The northern Eastern Ghats is an area with significant biodiversity value but remains poorly explored except for a few charismatic taxa such as birds, mammals and reptiles. Very few studies have looked at the invertebrate diversity of these hill ranges, particularly butterflies. We present the first peer-reviewed checklist of butterflies from the n...

Global conservation efforts have traditionally focused on biodiversity hotspots and other priority landscapes. However, large areas outside priority sites have high conservation value and are referred to as neglected landscapes. The Eastern Ghats of India is an unexplored forest landscape of high conservation value with several endemic and threaten...

Papikonda National Park covering an area of 1,012km2 holds high conservation value as the only national park in the geographically vast northern Eastern Ghats. The tropical moist deciduous forests support species assemblages characteristic of the Eastern Ghats. We conducted the first comprehensive assessment of the mammal diversity in Papikonda Nat...

Macaranga peltata, a pioneer tree species in the Western Ghats, suffers from a high degree of herbivory. This study examines patterns of herbivory on the species across primary and secondary forests of the Kallakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR), in the southern Western Ghats. Herbivory was higher on M. peltata in the primary forests of KMTR re...

The genus Prionailurus consists of forest dwelling spotted cats ranging across most of India (Sunquist and Sunquist 2002, Menon 2003). Few studies have been done on their presence and distribution across the Eastern Ghats. The present note reports the first camera trap records of the Leopard Cat Prionailurus benghalensis Kerr, 1792 and Rusty Spotte...

Introduction: Modification of landscapes leading to deforestation is one of the major causes for global biodiversity loss. The Eastern Ghats region is a treasure trove of biodiversity supporting more than 3,200 species of angiosperms (Panda et al. 2013). Rapid landscape changes are occurring in the region through deforestation, agricultural encroac...

If the mines don't get them… the dams will vikram aditya "We hunt the leopard. I can show you how we track them too," said the Konda Reddi tribal villager. We were at Villarthi village, in a remote forested stretch between the towns of Upper Sileru and Donkarayi in the northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh's Visakhapatnam district. Across southe...