Human - Wildlife conflict and forest fragmentation linkages in southern western ghats, India

The Western Ghats are biologically rich and diverse hill ranges that run along the west coast of
India from the river Tapti in the north to the southern tip of India. It covers an area of 1,60,000 sq
km which is just under 6% of the land area of India. The present study covers Kerala, Tamil Nadu
and Karnataka portions of Southern Western Ghats with an area of 94882.92 sq km. Southern
Western Ghats are facing tremendous pressure because of degradation, deforestation and
conversion of forested land into plantation and cropland. The main reason behind the pressure is
change in land use which lead to fragmentation. Fragmentation is basically landscape level process
in which large forest area is divided into smaller, isolated patches. Human activities for other land
use like agriculture or plantation has the most severe cause of fragmentation and biodiversity loss
in any area. The objective of this study is to estimate the land use and the extent of fragmentation
in Southern Western Ghats and to analyze the human animal conflict associated with the
fragmentation pattern of southern Western Ghats using Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS and GRASS GIS
software. Population density has been analyzed to understand social status and integrated with land
use pattern. The land use analysis shows horticulture as predominating category in Western Ghats
region of Kerala covering 29.75% of area. The maximum area is covered by cropland with 31.20%
in Tamil Nadu and along with Karnataka having 30.55% of the total area. Forest intactness is
measured by the proportion of four spatial patterns i.e. core, perforated, edge, interior and patches.
The total forest cover of the southern Western Ghats is 39.2%. The forest cover for each state is,
Karnataka has 17.6% of the total area, Kerala has 12.3% of the total area whereas Tamil Nadu has
9.5% of the total area in the southern Western Ghats. Linking the fragmentation result with human
animal conflict, it was observed that with the more fragmented area, more of the human animal
conflicts are present, especially near protected areas or national parks like Bandipur National park,
Wayanad Sanctuary, BRT, Nilambur forest division and The Nilgiri. The major conflict animals
are tigers, leopards and Elephants. This emphasizes the need to maintain continuity of intact forests
with native species (enriched with food and fodder species) as well as water bodies in the animal
corridors to prevent the losses associated with the human-animal conflicts.

MPhil EI 2017-2018 INT Dr. Jaishankar Nair