India on Monday announced a programme to open eight more long-term ecological observatories to study the effects of climate change.

The new facilities under the Indian Long Term Ecological Observatories (I-LTEO) would assess the health of eight different biomes (types of habitat) and come up with long-term research findings on the changes there that were happening due to climate change.

It will cover the Western Himalayas to Western Ghats, Eastern Himalayas to Andaman and Nicobar islands, central India to the Sundarbans, and from Jammu and Kashmir to Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Monitoring for 30 years

Launching the programme at the climate conference CoP21, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar said the research facility of the Indian Institute of Science at Mudumalai in the Western Ghats had been monitoring a 50-hectare plot for 30 years and mapping observations to climate change.

Flora and fauna

The I-LTEO would scientifically monitor flora and fauna to assess how climate change is affecting “natural and closely associated human systems in agriculture and pastoralism,” a Ministry publication released on the occasion said.