Long term ecological monitoring

ATREE initiated the long-term monitoring of plant phenology in the wet forests of Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR) in 1990, and in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple (BRT) tiger reserve in 2000. Since then, over 750 trees belonging to 70 species have been monitored every month for the last 26 years. This project aims to decipher the phenological patterns of canopy and sub-canopy trees and understand these changes in relation to the functional traits of the species and local (microhabitat) and global changes (climate). The curation of these extensive data set along with information on climatic variables is currently underway. Long-term vegetation monitoring plots from the evergreen forests of KMTR and dry deciduous forests of BRT Tiger Reserve were recently re-censused after a five-year interval. New data sets are being curated for analysis before integrating them into the previous census' datasets.