Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 37

Namdapha lies in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh, covers about 1,985 square kilometres and is the largest protected area in the Eastern Himalayan sub-region.

The Rajgir Zoo Safari stands at Rajgir in Nalanda district of Bihar, in the hills around the old Magadhan capital of Rajgriha.

Parliament passed the Environment (Protection) Act in 1986 and it came into force on 19 November 1986. It was enacted soon after the Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984, when the country needed one general law to fill the gaps left by the earlier pollution laws.

The Desert National Park, spread over sand dunes and open grassland near Jaisalmer and Barmer, is the best known habitat of this tall, heavy ground bird, whose numbers have fallen sharply and which is the state bird of Rajasthan.

In a national park the whole ecosystem is protected, rights are settled before the area is notified, grazing and cultivation are prohibited and the boundary cannot be altered except through a resolution of the state legislature.

It added two categories beyond the national park and the sanctuary: a conservation reserve, usually on state land adjoining a protected area and meant to guard a corridor between habitats, and a community reserve, on private or community land where the people themselves agree to protect wildlife.

Hemis lies in the cold, high altitude desert of Ladakh, covers a very large stretch of mountain terrain, and is the best known habitat of the snow leopard, along with the bharal and the Tibetan wolf.

Silent Valley lies in the Nilgiri hills of Kerala and protects one of the last stretches of undisturbed tropical evergreen forest in the Western Ghats, whose best known resident is the lion-tailed macaque.

Dachigam lies close to Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir and is the last stronghold of this deer, which moves between the upper and lower parts of the park with the seasons.

Keoladeo Ghana in Rajasthan is a shallow wetland created long ago as a duck shooting reserve of the rulers of Bharatpur, and it now shelters large numbers of resident and migratory birds every winter; it is a World Heritage Site.

It is the law under which a state government notifies a national park or a sanctuary, under which species are placed in schedules according to the protection they need, and under which hunting of protected animals is prohibited.

Project Tiger was launched a year after the Wild Life Protection Act came into force, and it created tiger reserves in which the core area is kept free of human activity while a buffer area allows regulated use; the National Tiger Conservation Authority now oversees the programme.

Kaziranga lies on the floodplain of the Brahmaputra in Assam, where tall elephant grass and seasonal flooding suit the rhinoceros, and the park is inscribed as a natural World Heritage Site.

Gir, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, is the only place where the Asiatic lion survives in the wild, and its dry deciduous forest and scrub make the habitat that keeps the population alive.

Declared in 1936 in the hills of present-day Uttarakhand, it was named after the governor of the United Provinces, later renamed Ramganga and finally named after the hunter turned naturalist Jim Corbett.

When forests are cleared, wetlands drained and grasslands ploughed, species lose the space they need, and the fragments that survive are often too small to support large animals or to allow populations to mix and breed.

The day marks the adoption of the text of the Convention on Biological Diversity and is used each year to draw attention to the loss of species and habitats.

Ex-situ conservation means protecting a species away from its natural habitat, and a seed bank does exactly that by storing seeds under controlled temperature and humidity for future use.

Project Tiger was launched to protect the tiger by conserving the habitat it needs, and because the tiger sits at the top of the food chain, saving it protects the whole forest below it.

Among species that still survive in the wild this is the most serious category, given to those facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future.