Conservation news 491
Managing human–wildlife conflict and coexistence is a Indeterminate and Possibly Extinct in the Red Data Book of field of continuous learning that requires collaborative pro- Indian Plants in , categorized as Critically Endangered cesses tailored to social and cultural contexts. To this end the on the IUCN Red List in , and included in the national IUCN Species Survival Commission Human–Wildlife Conflict priority list of threatened plants in . Task Force has published an IUCN Position Statement on While surveying for the rare tree Buchanania barberi the Management of Human–Wildlife Conflict, urging govern- in Ponmudi and Aryankavu during August –March ments, NGOs, researchers, practitioners, community leaders, , with support from The Mohamed Bin Zayed environmental agencies and others to ensure that efforts to Species Conservation Fund (grant no. ), we lo- manage human–wildlife conflicts are pursued through well- cated one flowering individual of D. travancoricum in the informed, holistic and collaborative processes that take into evergreen tropical rainforest of Ponmudi, at malti- account underlying social, cultural and economic contexts. tude.WedidnotlocatethespeciesinAryankavu.We The statement outlines the typical characteristics and conclude that the global population is small, with , underlying dimensions of these conflicts and proposes five matureindividualsinanareaof, km ,andrecom- key considerations to guide efforts promoting human– mend that it continues to be categorized as Critically wildlife coexistence: () interventions that focus only on re- Endangered, but based on criteria Bab(iii,v);D. In- ducing damage are not transferable from one case to another, formation from local people suggested that the potential () poorly informed human–wildlife conflict mitigation at- threats to the species are: () habitat destruction caused by tempts can exacerbate the situation, () context awareness road construction, () increasing tourism in Ponmudi (a and understanding of social and political backgrounds are hill station), () low fruit set despite a high level of flowering, crucial, () conflict mitigation and damage reduction inter- () few seedlings, and () former consumption of its fruits ventions must be designed and managed collaboratively, and as a tamarind substitute (it is known locally as hill tamarind () long-term solutions must incorporate landscape-scale or Malampuli). ecological, economic and physical patterns. Action is required for the protection of this rare species. Building on this, the Task Force is developing detailed At Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research practical guidelines to assist practitioners, researchers, Institute seed germination and seedling establishment experi- communities, and decision makers in navigating human– ments are being carried out on seeds collected from Ponmudi, wildlife interactions. The IUCN Species Survival Commis- and trials are underway to raise seedlings using tissue culture. sion Guidelines on the Management of Human–Wildlife Further surveys across Ponmudi and Aryankavu are required, Conflict and Coexistence, which provide comprehensive to determine if there are more individuals and, if so, to collect practical advice, will be piloted in late with conserva- additional seeds for ex situ conservation. tion projects around the globe. The IUCN Position Statement is available in four lan- ANURAG DHYANI ( orcid.org/0000-0003-0852-6237), guages at iucn.org/theme/species/publications/policies-and- S. SURESH, E.S. SANTHOSH KUMAR, S.M. SHAREEF and position-statements. R. PRAKASHKUMAR Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India ALEXANDRA ZIMMERMANN ( orcid.org/0000-0002-4371-3997) E-mail [email protected] and JAMES STEVENS IUCN Species Survival Commission Human–Wildlife Conflict Task Force, Oxford, UK This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0. E-mail [email protected]
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0. New guidelines allow companies to plan and monitor biodiversity performance at the corporate level Conserving Dialium travancoricum, a Critically Endangered endemic tree Businesses are striving to address their impacts on the environment and enhance their sustainability, but many Dialium travancoricum Bourd., an evergreen tree of the find biodiversity daunting to deal with. Numerous indicators family Leguminosae (Dialioideae), endemic to the southern and metrics have been designed for businesses to measure Western Ghats of Kerala, India, is the sole representative corporate-level biodiversity performance, but none covers of its genus in India. This species was first collected by T.F. all types of business operations in all biomes. To address Bourdillon in in Ponmudi, Thiruvananthapuram dis- these challenges, in March IUCN published Guide- trict, and later from Aryankavu, Kollam district. The spe- lines for Planning and Monitoring Corporate Biodiversity cies had not been recorded since then and there was no ex Performance (P.J. Stephenson & G. Carbone, , dx. situ conservation collection. The species was categorized as doi.org/./IUCN.CH...en). The guidelines take
Oryx, 2021, 55(4), 489–496 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000442 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.14, on 02 Oct 2021 at 12:46:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605321000429