- Recording and monitoring bird calls to map soundscapes after a restoration project can help detect changes in the health of a forest.
- Scientists are stringing recorders around trees in eastern Madhya Pradesh to listen to bird calls and monitor changes in health of restored dry, deciduous forests after the removal of invasive shrub Lantana camara.
- Such soundscape measurements can create baseline data to keep track of long term changes in forests. But bioacoustics need to be complemented with physical ground truthing surveys to draw effective conclusions on restoration outcomes.
Atop a mound that was once awash with Lantana thickets, he points to a tangled mass of upturned, dead Lantana bushes in a patch of land in Chicchari village in Mandla district in eastern Madhya Pradesh, home to significant stretches of dry, deciduous forests in India.
Jharia describes his and his community’s experience with Lantana in the 14-hectare common property land, saying that the invasive species, with its impenetrable bushes, deterred the community from accessing a small plot of land for their livelihood. Here, Lantana smothered the growth of native plants such as tendu and mahua, the produce of which is seasonally collected and sold. It is also used for daily needs (medicinal plants and grazing livestock).
Introduced in India as an ornamental plant in the early 1800s, Lantana escaped from gardens and spread across ecosystems, now occupying 40 percent of India’s tiger range alone including vast swathes in Central India. The people in the region call Lantana, “baramasiya”, which means ‘of 12 months’ in Hindi, because it remains green throughout the year. “We also used to guard our farms from crop-raiding wild animals because they hid in the Lantana bushes,” recalls Jharia.