Plant Professor Bratrat Babu Sheresha When they visited Nepal’s Chitwan National Park in 2013, there was little fever in the flower family. Today, large areas of the park’s lawn are covered with invasive plants, says Shresha, who teaches at the University of Truman, on the outskirts of Kathmandu.
Indigenous plants are spreading rapidly in Nepal’s oldest national park in recent years – one of the reasons for the warming of fossil fuels on the planet, according to the Invasion Ecologist. Shresha, for her part, said: “The changing climate seems to be conducive to the rapid growth of invasive plants. The growing wildlife in Chitwan, a 950-square-kilometer (370-square-mile) park in the southern plains of Nepal, is now overflowing with grasslands and wetlands that provide fodder and shelter for wildlife. Climate change is a problem that is seen in parks and reserves around the world when it comes to what it means to “take care of nature”.
“More than ever, the park is in serious danger of losing its homes,” said Ananat Barral, chief of the Citian Guard. “We are concerned about the future of wildlife. Over the past decade, the park’s lawns have been overgrown with weeds such as Fever Flow, Lantana, the Vine per minute and one of the world’s most troublesome invaders.
As a result, he said, some parts of the park, including the one-horned rhinoceros, deer, and ants, have been partially or completely lost. Map of Chitwan’s latest lawn, Published in 2016, when the reserve was established, it reduced the size of the park’s grass-covered area and its grass-covered reserve to 6%, down from 20 percent in 1973.
Both temperatures and variable rainfall have allowed non-native plants to thrive, said Kathmandu, director of the Kathmandu-based Interspection Research Institute. He warned that global warming could predict global warming in the near future as war on fossil fuels continues.
Double problem
Like the meadows, the park’s wetlands are also under stress: the region’s wildlife is covered by vegetation, and flooding and unpredictable droughts are causing biological damage, say biologists.
Babu Ram Lamichan, head of the Sauraha Biodiversity Center at the entrance to Chitwan, said heavy rains combined with winter floods and prolonged dry spells in the spring were degrading the wetlands of Chitwan. Many ponds and walkways in the park have dried up and turned into forest or vacant land, while others have been flooded with sand, silt and gravel. “Too much and too little water – both are problems today. They are threatening the park’s rich diversity by changing the habitat of the wildlife, ”said Lamichan. The spring season of 2019 was so dry that park officials said they had to install water wells in the wild buffalo. And one-horned rhinos have left two places on the east side of the park because the most severe dry season means swamps will no longer be flooded.
As water sources dry up and grasslands dwindle, some park animals have begun to move to better human settlements in search of better grazing and water, increasing the risk of human and wildlife conflicts, park officials said. Residents in villages near the park are now reporting more frequent wildlife attacks and damage to their crops, said Barral, head of conservation.
High costs
Nepal’s wildlife officials say that coping with the problem is costly in terms of manpower and budget. “We need to dig new ponds and build lawns every year,” said Haribhadra Acharya, a spokesman for the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Department. Another 35 are trying to catch and store rainwater and rainwater, said the village guard, P. Shipp Ripsha. He said they have also worked to create 2,500 hectares (6,200 hectares) of new grasslands in the park. Its maintenance efforts – which include weeding out, cutting down trees and burning grass – have taken about 50 million Nepalese rupees ($ 420,000) – 40% of the park’s total development budget.
Five years later, the annual report of Chitwan National Park shows that only 9.5 million Nepalese rupees were spent on maintenance efforts. Working hard to protect the park’s ecosystem and wildlife means that climate change has not yet affected the park’s tourism – and there are fears that a conservation officer may one day face it.
Chitwan National Park generates more than 295 million Nepalese rolls each year – about 40% of the total revenue in Nepal’s 20 protected areas, according to a DNPC report. He said more than a third of tourists visiting Nepal to visit protected areas want to visit wildlife and adventure forest travelers. But he warned that if the park’s animals and habitats were not properly cared for, they would “stop coming.” A few years ago, the park’s main concern was stopping poachers. But now, “climate change is becoming more and more difficult to protect,” says Lamichan, a biologist.
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