Western Ghats sentinel landscape

Agroforestry systems (coffee, tea, rubber, pepper, areca nut, cardamom) shape much of the Western Ghats in India. Commercial agriculture in this area has existed for centuries. Now, these commercial crops reach the margins of protected areas. In many cases, the only forests left are small sections that are either community-managed (i.e. sacred forests) or privately owned.

This sentinel landscape is located in the central section of a mountain range, from Goa to the Palakkad Gap, spanning across Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. All the ecosystem services in the intended areas express different spatial scales in different landscape contexts. Understanding the dynamics between tree cover, biodiversity and the variety of ecosystem services is a predominant issue in such landscapes.

One major undertaking is including ‘dis-services’ in the equation. We cannot fully understand the relationship between people and forests without incorporating what the costs of living in close proximity to a forest entails: crop loss to wildlife, transmission of diseases, insecurity, etc. Resolving economic and environmental tradeoffs is similarly important, and a scientifically and politically informed framework to understand the tradeoffs between services and between stakeholders, and the imbalance between actors, can help define the outcomes of proposed policies of natural resources management.