For my summer placement project, I will be working with Wildlife First, a wildlife advocacy non profit based in Bengaluru, India to create maps of the Nethravathi river basin. Nethravathi river basin lies in the south western part of peninsular India. Tributaries of Nethravathi river originate in the forested mountains which are part of the Western Ghats, a mountain range which runs North to south along the West coast of India. These forests are home to many threatened and endemic species such as the Asian Elephant, Tiger, Leopard, Gaur and act as a critical link between Kudremukh National Park in the North and Talacauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in the South.

These forests face threat from a number of ill planned linear intrusion projects such as roads, dams etc. In the past 5 years, 8 dams have been built across 8 tributaries of the Nethravathi river and there are about 5-6 new projects in the pipeline, such as new roads cutting through intact patches of forest, widening of existing roads and building many more dams across other tributaries. Such projects come at the cost of loss of forests, habitat fragmentation and water security issues. To quantify this, I will be creating a land use map using Sentinel 2 satellite imagery, overlay it with the existing and proposed linear intrusions to derive and compare landscape metrics. This will help in understanding the present scenario and how proposed intrusions will alter the landscape.

When I think of the Western Ghats, I think of it as home – a region where I have lived for over 5 years. This project gives me an opportunity to further understand the where, what, how, why questions I personally have about this critical landscape link. I just finished a round of fieldwork mapping various landuses of the watershed. While it was painful to see some areas ripped open, I saw hope in some of the intact patches. Over the next few weeks, I will use the field data to create landuse maps, meet with my host supervisor Niren Jain, and work on the analysis.