India’s savannah grasslands are home to wildlife such as wolves, striped hyenas, jackals, chinkaras, hares, porcupines, Indian foxes, and leopards. But as habitats shrink and are reshaped by infrastructure and land-use change, wildlife movement and interactions are also changing.

People are often quick to assume that leopard numbers are increasing. But are leopards becoming more abundant, or are they being pushed out of former habitats now replaced by airports, highways, and green energy sites? We do not yet know.

Through our camera traps, we recorded a mother leopard and her two cubs using a path shared by wildlife, livestock, and people, just 70 metres from human habitation. At the same time, local communities report hearing less and less of wolves. Our work aims to understand these changing interactions and what they mean for people, livestock, and grassland predators.

Our work begins with a simple belief: people living closest to nature are often its deepest knowledge holders. Their everyday lives are shaped by close observation of seasons, wildlife, grazing patterns, water, and vegetation, making traditional ecological knowledge essential to understanding and caring for these landscapes. We work with this belief to strengthen and elevate regional stewardship.

In Surendranagar’s commons, we have worked to establish a biodiversity baseline while deepening community participation in conservation. In this landscape, Maldhari pastoralists have long lived alongside grasslands, herding indigenous livestock breeds and sustaining a way of life closely tied to the health of the commons. By recognising their stewardship role, we aim to build local leadership in grassland conservation and ensure their knowledge and voices help shape land-use decisions.

Grasslands remain among the least understood and most overlooked ecosystems in conservation science, often undervalued despite the many services they provide. In our landscape, we employ a pastoralist lens to understand grassland health more fully, as both a wildlife habitat and a source of grazing, livelihood support, ecological resilience, and long-term coexistence between people and nature.

Our restoration work in Chotila’s grasslands focuses on removing the invasive alien plant Senna uniflora (locally known as kuvad), which is degrading grazing lands and altering habitat for native grassland wildlife. Its spread threatens both pastoral livelihoods and species such as the Indian gazelle, which depend on open grasslands.

Understanding grasslands requires looking beyond what is visible today and asking what has shaped these landscapes over time: land lineage, grazing practices, seasonal movement, customary management, and the relationships between people, livestock, and wildlife. 

Our work documents decades-old knowledge systems that have long supported grassland ecosystems, yet have remained largely neglected within conservation science. In Chotila’s commons, Maldhari pastoralists carry detailed knowledge of land, forage, livestock, water, and wildlife that offers valuable insight into how these open landscapes function.

In Lahaul’s high-altitude landscapes, agrarian and pastoral communities share space with species such as the Himalayan brown bear, snow leopard, Himalayan wolf, red fox, Himalayan ibex, and blue sheep.  Building on previous research, we are working with farmers, orchard owners and governmen agencies to better understand these interactions and develop mitigation strategies that support both biodiversity and livelihoods. At present, we are focusing on understanding the patterns of crop depredation by Himalayan brown bears in the left bank villages of the Chenab in Lahaul, while also exploring ways to mitigate these losses through technical interventions as well as policy-level solutions.

(The Himalayan brown bear photograph featured here was taken by Mr. Shiv Kumar, Lahaul Forest Division.)

Lahaul is shaped by harsh winters, rugged terrain, and long periods of isolation. For much of the year, snow, freezing temperatures, and difficult access define everyday life. Residents here have adapted to these conditions over generations, building livelihoods and knowledge systems closely attuned to seasonality, terrain, crops, livestock, and wildlife movement. This deep familiarity with the landscape is a form of stewardship in itself.

Our work recognises that people living closest to this environment hold important knowledge about how the ecosystem changes through the year. The seasonal calendar shown here, developed with the women of Jasrath, reflects this lived understanding. It maps the cycles of weather, agriculture, livestock, wildlife presence, and daily labour across the seasons, offering a picture of how life and ecology are deeply interconnected in this high-altitude landscape.

Lahaul’s trans-Himalayan ecosystems provide critical habitats for wide-ranging carnivores and alpine fauna, as well as threatened medicinal plants such as Aconitum heterophyllum (Atis), Picrorhiza kurroa (Kutki), and Dactylorhiza hatagirea (Salampanja). By integrating ecological data with local observations, our goal is to contribute to recovery strategies for species threatened by climate change, habitat fragmentation, and negative interactions with human activity.

In collaboration with the Lahaul Forest Division, we are contributing to an eco-tourism development plan that integrates restoration of fragile ecosystems with sustainable livelihoods. Our long-term vision is to rewild degraded areas while supporting ecologically sensitive tourism models.