Forest dept. seeks court intervention in eradicating invasive plants in Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary

Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary plans to eradicate invasive plants with High Court permission, following successful Tamil Nadu model.

The Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (WWS) authorities are planning to approach the Kerala High Court to grant permission to extract Senna spectabilis, an invasive plant which poses a major threat to the wildlife habitat in the Nilgiri biosphere, to eradicate the species from the sanctuary.

Since the existing norms would not allow cutting down trees from a protected area or a wildlife sanctuary, extraction of trees is not possible, sanctuary sources said. But the Mudumalai and Sathyamangalam tiger reserves (STR) in Tamil Nadu had obtained a favourable order from the Chennai High Court after convincing the Court about the gravity of the situation. The Court ordered the removal of over 60 hectares in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and 645 hectares in STR.

The Forest department collaborated with Tamil Nadu Newsprint and Papers Limited (TNPL) to remove the trees, for which it was asked to pay a conservation charge of ₹4,200 a tonne. The money would be utilised for eco-restoration of habitats. The TNPL uses the culled senna tree to make pulpwood in its paper mills there.

The recent study of the KFRI identified as many as 22 invasive plants in the sanctuary that have been posing a serious threat to its flora and fauna. Now the officials of the Sanctuary are planning to follow the path of the tiger reserves to eradicate the plants.

The sanctuary is spread over 34,440 hectares. The Forest department executed a ₹5.31-crore project to eradicate the plants on 1,672 hectares in the WWS a year ago with financial assistance from the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) a few months ago. Trees above 10-cm-girth will be girdled and below the size will be uprooted under the project.

The department could debark 1.61 lakhs of trees and uprooted small plants on 1700 hectares of land under the project so far.

The multicores project was time-consuming and is yet to yield the desired result, said N. Badusha, president, Wayanad Prakruthi Samrakshana Samiti. If the officials replicated the project in the Tamil Nadu forest through forest development agencies, it would help to mitigate the accelerating human-wildlife conflict in the district in a time-bound manner, he added.