Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 22

The correct answer is B, Kuno National Park in the Sheopur area of Madhya Pradesh, where cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa were released from 2022 under the cheetah reintroduction project; the cheetah had been declared extinct in India in 1952.

The breeding centres stand in the Jaisalmer region, near the Desert National Park, which holds the largest surviving population of the bird, and they are run by the state forest department with the Wildlife Institute of India: eggs are collected from the wild, hatched in incubators and the chicks reared…

The correct answer is C, about minus 196 degrees Celsius, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, at which all metabolic activity in the stored material stops and the germplasm can be kept for very long periods without change.

These seeds lose their viability when their moisture content is reduced, so they cannot be kept in the cold rooms of a seed bank; mango, jackfruit, coconut, cocoa and most tropical fruit trees are examples, and they are conserved instead in field gene banks, as tissue cultures or in cryobanks.

The Botanical Survey of India was founded in 1890 with its headquarters in Kolkata, close to the Indian Botanic Garden at Howrah, and it surveys the plant resources of the country, publishes floras and maintains herbaria and botanical gardens through its regional circles.

The correct answer is A, the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources at New Delhi, an institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, which holds the National Gene Bank where seeds of crop plants and their wild relatives are stored at low temperature for long-term conservation.

The correct answer is B, Robert Kyd, an officer of the East India Company who proposed and founded the garden at Shibpur in Howrah in 1787, first for growing plants of economic value such as teak and spices.

The correct answer is B, the Alipore Zoological Garden in Kolkata, opened to the public in 1876 and therefore the oldest formally established zoo in the country.

The amendment of 1991 inserted the provisions on zoos into that Act, and the Central Zoo Authority was constituted in 1992 to recognise zoos, prescribe standards for animal housing, upkeep and veterinary care and coordinate conservation breeding; a zoo without its recognition cannot operate.

Ex-situ conservation means keeping a species, or only its germplasm, outside its natural habitat, which is what a botanical garden, a zoo, an aquarium, a seed bank, a gene bank or a conservation breeding centre does.

Trained as a physicist, she turned to agriculture and founded Navdanya, a network of community seed banks that collects, stores and freely exchanges traditional varieties of rice, millet, pulses and oilseeds, and that campaigns against the patenting of seed and of plants long used in India.

The Tawa project on a tributary of the Narmada in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh brought canal irrigation to black cotton soil that already held water well.

From the late nineteen seventies Jadav Payeng planted saplings year after year on a bare, eroding sandbar of the Brahmaputra near Majuli, and the patch grew into a forest of several hundred hectares that is now called the Molai forest after him.

In 1982 the government proposed to convert the natural sal forests of Singhbhum, then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand, into plantations of teak, which fetches a far higher price as timber.

He carried the Chipko message on foot across the Himalaya and summed up its argument in the phrase that ecology is permanent economy, meaning that a standing forest yields soil, water and pure air for ever while felled timber yields money once.

Through the Tarun Bharat Sangh he revived the johad, the traditional crescent-shaped earthen check dam, across the dry Alwar district of Rajasthan.

At Khejarli near Jodhpur in 1730, the men of the Maharaja of Jodhpur came to fell khejri trees for lime kilns needed to build a new palace.

The Kerala State Electricity Board proposed a hydroelectric dam across the Kunthipuzha river in Palakkad district, which would have submerged a tract of undisturbed tropical evergreen rainforest and the habitat of the lion-tailed macaque.

She has led the Narmada Bachao Andolan since it took shape in 1985 against the Sardar Sarovar and other large dams on the Narmada, arguing that the displaced, many of them tribal, were never given land or proper rehabilitation.

The Appiko movement began in 1983 at Salkani village in the Sirsi taluk of Uttara Kannada district, in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, under Pandurang Hegde.