Amit Kaushik
India faces a complex conservation challenge: safeguarding its diverse carnivore assemblage amid rising human pressures. In the newly designated Veerangana Durgawati Tiger Reserve, recent tiger reintroductions and the displacement of villages are transforming landscapes shared with threatened Indian wolves (Canis lupus pallipes).
My project will explore how wolves adapt to these rapid changes and promote human-wolf coexistence through community-based camera trapping, interviews, and participatory mapping. By identifying conflict hotspots and barriers to compensation access, I will co-develop actionable strategies for conflict mitigation and habitat management, supporting both long-term wolf conservation and the well-being of affected local communities.
The Indian wolf (Canis lupus pallipes) is an endangered, Schedule I species that serves as a vital indicator for the health of India’s rapidly disappearing semi-arid grasslands. While India’s conservation efforts have historically focused on forest-dwelling megafauna like the Bengal tiger, the survival of wolves often depends on unprotected, human-dominated landscapes. This project focuses on Veerangana Durgawati Tiger Reserve (VDTR) in Madhya Pradesh—a unique landscape where a 2018 tiger reintroduction initiative has fundamentally altered the ecological hierarchy.
Historically, the wolf was the apex predator in this region. However, as the reintroduced tiger population has surged over the past few years, the Indian wolf has been pushed to navigate a transition from apex predator to mesopredator. Preliminary hypothesis suggests this ecological pressure could displace wolves toward the reserve’s periphery—areas inhabited by livestock-dependent Adivasi, Dalit, and Yadav communities. This spatial shift could potentially heighten the risk of human-wolf conflict in the long run as the tiger population grows in the reserve, yet these interactions remain understudied and often overlooked by traditional conservation frameworks.
This project bridges the gap between ecological research and social justice through three primary aims:
1. Using a systematic grid of camera traps, we will quantify the spatial and temporal overlap between reintroduced tigers and Indian wolves to understand how mesopredators adapt to the presence of an apex competitor.
2. Through semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping, we will document wolf habitat use and livestock depredation patterns in non-protected areas to create a robust evidence base for local compensation claims.
3. We will co-develop conflict-mitigation tools and early-warning systems by training local youth in wildlife monitoring. This empowers marginalized communities to transition from passive bystanders to active stakeholders in conservation decision-making.
My project integrates rigorous occupancy modelling with grassroots social science and seeks to ensure that the recovery of tigers is inclusive and involves multispecies coexistence approaches for the beings who share this landscape.