The ministry had first announced the Long Term Ecological Observatories (LTEO) programme at the Paris climate summit December.

“Immediacy and critical nature of climate change brought into sharp focus the lack of information available on how key environmental parameters are changing across the country, and how ecological systems are responding to these major changes. Understanding the response of species and habitats to large-scale environmental changes is important for conservation of those species and habitats themselves,” said a senior MoEFCC official, who did not wish to be identified, while justifying the need for the programme.

“In addition, these responses will have major impacts on human communities that depend on natural resources,” the officer added.

As per the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEFCC), the “goals of this programme are to develop and support long-term ecological research and monitoring in India, particularly in the context of climate change impacts on the country’s diverse ecosystems.”

The LTEO programme will pick up signals of climate change impact and data generated will be archived in a national repository.

For the research, MoEFCC has selected diverse climatic regions—western Himalayas eastern Himalayas, north-western arid zone, central Indian forests, Western Ghats, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Jammu & Kashmir and Sundarbans.

The science plan for LTEO will include establishment of a network of field sites, including existing and new sites and stations which will form the base for the research activities. The network will be established to serve as nodes for long term monitoring and threat assessment, for use by a wide range of institutions working in these areas.

“In first phase, a common minimum LTEO research programme will be established, where data on ecological and related social parameters will be collected at selected field sites. The programme will be spread across several years,” the ministry official cited above said.

As per the ministry, each of the eight sites is a landscape spread across one or more environmental gradients such as altitude, precipitation and biome.

“Researchers can give proposal for any of the research themes to initiate long-term monitoring on the said parameters at any of the listed sites. In general, multiple monitoring locations (3-5 observatories) will be established at each site, which will capture the most important environmental gradients in that landscape,” the official explained.

Research themes for climatic regions:

1. Bird populations

2. Biophysical climatic variables

3. Hydrology and soil processes in forests and grasslands

4. Large carnivore and large herbivore populations

5. Medium and small mammal populations

6. Freshwater fish populations

7. Animal movements across multiple spatial scales

8. Coastal and marine ecology