Conservation managers and policy makers are often confronted with a challenging dilemma of devising suitable strategies to maintain agricultural productivity while conserving endemic species that at the early stages of becoming pests of agricultural crops. Identification of environmental factors conducive to species range expansion for forecasting species distribution patterns will play a central role in devising management strategies to minimize the conflict between the agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation. Here, we present results of a...

Tropical montane habitats, grasslands, in particular, merit urgent conservation attention owing to the disproportionate levels of endemic biodiversity they harbour, the ecosystem services they provide, and the fact that they are among the most threatened habitats globally. The Shola Sky Islands in the Western Ghats host a matrix of native forest-grassland matrix that has been planted over the last century, with exotic timber plantations. The popular discourse on the landscape change is that mainly forests...

Senna spectabilis, a native tree of tropical America is rapidly colonizing the forests of Western Ghats. We identified the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) as the major disperser of Senna, with the dung facilitating germination of the species. The study provides critical information for the management of Senna in tropical Asia, elephants, Western Ghats, Senna spectabilis, and seed dispersal.

Datasets were collected as part of the project titled "EVALUATING THE EFFICEINCY OF RESTORATION EFFORTS IN REVIVING TROPICAL FORESTS USING GROUND INSECTS AS INDICATORS."

Old world fruit bats are important seed dispersers of forest plants as well as of commercial fruit crops. Bats scatter seeds across landscapes and also aggregate (clump) seeds under feeding and roosting trees. In agroforestry landscapes, bat frugivory and seed dispersal can result in simultaneous accrual of socio-economic benefits and costs to humans, which may be further affected by human health risks from zoonotic spillover through human-bat interactions. In our study, we used an integrated...

This dataset contains data on geomorphological characteristics and flow-related variables along the Beas River (Punjab, India) between Pong dam and Harike barrage in January 2020. The variables provided include cross-sectional area, water depth, river channel width, river flow velocity and dry-season discharge measured at ten reference sites with stable banks and straight, linear channels without islands or other mid-channel structures.

Fire and elephant herbivory are major drivers of large tree mortality in savanna ecosystems. While the spatial variation of these agents is well-studied, less attention has been paid to how disturbance history influences mortality risk for trees over time. In a long-term cohort study, we examined how the sequence of fire- and elephant-induced damage influences mortality of trees, and determined whether risk of mortality is compounded with time. Data on over 2500 large trees were...

Environmental heterogeneity is considered as one of the main drivers of habitat specialization and niche evolution among tropical plant lineages, and local scale habitat specialization promotes niche differentiation among sister taxa. In this study, we examined the degree to which habitat specialization lead to niche differentiation across the distribution range of a given species using five species of the family Myristicaceae native to Western Ghats, India as an example. In the Western Ghats, Myristicaceae species...

Tropical agro-forest landscapes are global priority areas for biodiversity conservation. Little is known about the ability of these landscapes to sustain large late successional forest trees upon which much forest biodiversity depends. These landscapes are subject to fragmentation and additional habitat degradation which may limit tree recruitment and thus compromise numerous ecosystem services including carbon storage and timber production. Dysoxylum malabaricum is a large canopy tree species in the Meliaceae, a family including many important...

Tropical trees often display long distance pollen dispersal, even in highly fragmented landscapes. Understanding how patterns of spatial isolation influence gene flow and interact with background patterns of fine scale spatial genetic structure are critical for evaluating the genetic consequences of habitat fragmentation. In the endangered tropical timber tree Dysoxylum malabaricum (Meliaceae) we apply eleven microsatellite markers with paternity and parentage analysis to directly estimate contemporary gene flow across a large area (216 km2) in...

Amphibians show a high amount of species richness and endemism. Such diversity can be attributed to their microenvironment as amphibians display fine-scale heterogeneity depending on the microhabitats they inhabit. Tadpoles are considered as good indicators for understanding microhabitat-species association as they reflect the breeding sites and signify species survival potential. In this study, we assessed the microhabitat factors influencing the distribution of tadpoles of three endemic frogs of the genus Nyctibatrachus namely N. jog, N....

Most new infectious diseases emerge when pathogens transfer from animals to humans1,2. The suspected origin of the COVID pandemic in wildlife wet market has resurfaced debates on the role of wildlife trade as a potential source of emerging zoonotic diseases3,4,5. Yet, there are no studies quantitatively assessing zoonotic disease risk associated with wildlife trade. Combining data of mammal species hosting zoonotic viruses and data on mammals known to be in current and future wildlife trade6,...

Data are presented for daily rainfall, stream discharge and hydraulic conductivity of soils from catchments located in the Upper Nilgiris Reserve Forest in the state of Tamil Nadu. The catchments are dominated by four land cover types, shola, grassland, pine and wattle. The data were collected between May 2014 and December 2016. Tipping bucket wired rain gauges were used to measure rainfall. Stream discharge was measured from stilling wells and capacitance probe-based water level recorders....

This data package includes spatial environmental and social layers for Shivamogga District, Karnataka, India that were considered as potential predictors of patterns in human cases of Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD). KFD is a fatal tick-borne viral haemorrhagic disease of humans, that is spreading across degraded forest ecosystems in India. The layers encompass a range of fifteen metrics of topography, land use and land use change, livestock and human population density and public health resources for...

Biodiversity of tropical grasslands and savannas (tropical grassy biomes; TGBs) remains poorly documented compared to tropical forests. This is in part due to the misplaced notion of TGBs being anthropogenic forest derivatives that support negligible biodiversity and endemism. For the Indian savannas, the legacy of colonial forestry has led to their misinterpretation as anthropogenic wastelands of low conservation value. One key assumption underlying the devaluation of Indian savannas against Indian forests is the presumed absence...

Data provided are monthly surface water layers extracted from Sentinel1A SAR data for 3 districts in India (Shivamogga, Sindhudurg, Wayanad) for the year 2017 and 2018. Surface water body layers were mapped using an average monthly threshold value extracted from the image backscatter histogram. The average threshold value excluded the monsoon months due to the difference in water and not water area. The threshold value was slightly lesser than the mean threshold value. The end...

Larger animals are assumed to ingest larger seeds and consume larger fruits, but empirical studies reveal inconsistent trends between body mass and the average size of fruits and seeds ingested. Further, no studies have explored seed size relationships with morphological traits, such as skull dimensions. Such characteristics might provide more reliable estimates of ingestion ability and allow for accurate predictions of seed dispersal capacity in species for which we lack empirical data, especially extinct species....

The dataset contains stable isotope data from surface and groundwater samples collected in the Gandak Basin, north India. The data was collected between March 2017 and February 2019. These measurements were taken to improve understanding of surface and subsurface water interconnections and movement through river and canal networks and underlying aquifers. The data were collected as part of the NERC sponsored project Coupled Human and Natural Systems Environment (CHANSE), grant number NE/N01670X/1