Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 31

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.

Project Tiger began on 1 April 1973 with a small group of reserves, Jim Corbett among the first, and introduced the idea of a strictly protected core area with a buffer zone of regulated use around it.

The correct answer is B, the Gangetic river dolphin, declared the National Aquatic Animal in 2009; it is nearly blind and navigates by echolocation, and Project Dolphin was announced in 2020 for its conservation along with other river and marine dolphins.

The earthworm is called the farmer's friend because its work keeps soil fit for crops. As it burrows it loosens the soil and lets air and water reach the roots, and the castings it leaves behind are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potash, so the topsoil is steadily renewed.

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.

An ecotone is the transition zone where two different ecosystems meet and mix, such as the belt between a grassland and a forest, an estuary between a river and the sea, or a mangrove strip between land and ocean.

The correct answer is C, Rajasthan, where the bird is called the godawan and where its stronghold, the Desert National Park near Jaisalmer, holds most of the surviving population; conservation breeding centres in that district raise chicks for release into the wild.

Successive assessments by the Forest Survey of India have placed Madhya Pradesh first among the States in the absolute area under forest cover, a position it owes to its very large size and to the extensive teak and sal forests of the Satpura, Vindhya and Baghelkhand tracts.

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.

It was notified in 1936 as Hailey National Park, the first national park in India, was later renamed after the hunter turned conservationist Jim Corbett, and was among the nine reserves with which Project Tiger started in 1973.

Every year thousands of females come ashore at Gahirmatha for the synchronised mass nesting called arribada, which makes it the largest rookery of the species in the world; Rushikulya on the same coast is the other major site, and the Sea Turtle Project of 1999 works at both.

The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 inserted the power for the Central Government to specify a Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, which is why the market sits with the Ministry of Power and its Bureau of Energy Efficiency rather than with the environment ministry.

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.

Thermal and nuclear power stations draw large volumes of water to condense steam and return it several degrees warmer, which makes them the single largest source of waste heat in rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

Vultures that fed on the carcasses of treated animals developed kidney failure and died, and three species of Gyps vulture declined catastrophically within a few years, which is why the veterinary use of the drug was banned in 2006 and meloxicam promoted as a safe substitute.

An aquifer is a body of rock or loose sediment that is both saturated with groundwater and permeable enough to let that water move freely, so a well sunk into it keeps yielding water.

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 correct answer is A, the Gir forest of Gujarat, the last refuge of the Asiatic lion, which once ranged from west Asia to eastern India; the Asiatic Lion Conservation Project was launched in 2018 for it, and the Barda sanctuary nearby has been developed as a second habitat.

The correct answer is A, Dachigam National Park, near Srinagar, which holds almost the whole surviving population of the hangul, the only species of red deer found in India and the state animal of Jammu and Kashmir.

Keibul Lamjao, on Loktak lake in Manipur, rests on phumdis, floating mats of soil and decaying vegetation thick enough to carry the weight of a deer, which makes it the only floating national park in the world; the sangai that walks on them is the state animal of Manipur and…