The research of Dr. Ana Rodrigues and her colleagues, much appreciated by our team here in the Western Ghats (no hard feelings, of course, that Colombia has a hotspot considered greater in terms of irreplaceability), is featured in a story in today’s Guardian: 

…”This beautiful mountain, which is not far from cities and towns, is being colonised by rich people building second homes,” said Dr Ana Rodrigues, a researcher at the CEFE-CNRS institute in France, who led the new study. The team’s analysis of the world’s 173,000 nature reserves identified 138 that were “exceptionally irreplaceable.”

 

The top 10 sites, based on the threatened species they harbour, range across some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes and include some of the rarest and most exotic creatures.

The second most irreplaceable nature reserve is a thin range of coastal hills in India called the Western Ghats, where Asian elephants, lion-tailed macaques, rare mountain goats and many more species struggle for space alongside a huge human population.

“It is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots that also has the highest population density,” said Dr TR Shankar Raman, a leader of India‘s Nature Conservation Foundation in the Western Ghats. The rainforest is already fragmented by older tea, coffee and rubber plantations and now is being cut by new roads and mines. “India is in a growth stage,” said Raman. “There are many species that are really irreplaceable that will be lost.”…

Read the whole story here.  Meanwhile, thank you Dr Rodrigues.