A national park in India that has been ravaged by poachers and armed conflict is seeing a resurgence of several endangered species thanks to changes in politics and increased conservation efforts.
Manas National Park is home to threatened bird and mammal species. Because of its location in the eastern part of India in the Himalayan foothills along the border with Bhutan, it has been subject to decades of armed conflict and civil unrest, according to a study in Nature, per The Island Packet.
Those conflicts resulted in park employees being targeted by "armed rebels" and the poaching of elephants to operate with limited interference from the 1980s to the 2000s, leading to declines in wildlife. The one-horned rhino became locally extinct, swamp deer nearly followed suit, and prey animals necessary for the endangered carnivores in the park were overhunted to provide "bush meat."
Researchers conducted studies using camera traps and field surveys to track populations and found that many of the species had bounced back.
"Rhinoceros and swamp deer populations grew significantly," researchers said, noting that elephants had reached the highest densities in the world, along with high densities of tigers and wild buffalo. Leopards, gaur, sambar, and barking deer populations were stable, indicating habitat recovery and "functionality," per the researchers.
They attributed the success to a few factors, including the "restoration of law and order" in the region, along with the work of park personnel and increased quality of monitoring tools.
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The restoration of these various species in the park is important to maintaining biodiversity, a necessary component in reducing the impact of planet-warming gases.
As the United Nations explains, half of the harmful carbon pollution produced by humans remains in the atmosphere, and the other half is absorbed by the land and the ocean, making them natural carbon sinks.
Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is one of the many ways to ensure a clean and sustainable future, limiting pollution and its impact, such as extreme weather events.
And like the park in India, more and more places are seeing positive growth for species that were once threatened or endangered. Some examples include gray wolves in California, Przewalski's horse in Mongolia, and red-tailed phascogales in Australia.
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