Czechs convicted

an indian court has convicted two Czech nationals arrested for illegally collecting insects in Singalila National Park, West Bengal. On September 10, the chief judicial magistrate in Darjeeling sentenced Emil Kucera to three years in jail and fined him Rs 50,000. Entomologist Petr Svacha was fined Rs 20,000.

Conservation in a cocoon

London's Natural History Museum has revealed its iconic new wing to the world. Called the Darwin Centre Phase Two, an eight-storey "Cocoon", encased inside a glass atrium, it has been designed to conserve about 28 million insects and 6 million plant specimens, ranging from the historic original cocoa plant (brought from Jamaica in 1639) to species collected by Charles Darwin in his Beagle voyage (1831).

Neutrino in elephant's way

A proposed observatory in Nilgiri forests threatens to disturb wildlife movement

Wealth of biodiversity

www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Living on the edge

Protected areas attract human settlements?

Found in sacred groves

Two species of trees, earlier considered extinct, rediscovered

Natural bad debt

GDP does not calculate the wealth of ecosystems and biodiversity Human well-being is completely dependent on the smooth flow of ecosystem services, such as food, fibres, clean water, healthy soil and carbon capture. They are public goods, but with no market and no prices, and hence are rarely detected by the economic compass of our times, gdp

Global warming will favour temperate insects

contrary to popular belief that global warming will lead to population explosion in insects, a recent study claims otherwise. It says the phenomenon will lead to extinction of insects in the tropical zone by the end of the century.

250 yrs of biological research on the web now

the Encyclopaedia of Life is a click away. First 30,000 pages of the 10-year-old project, which aims to document information on all species, includes data on classification of the species, their history, ecology and geographical range. Developers of the project say researchers and students will benefit from the data bank, which highlights the trends and patterns in biodiversity.

Environment protection act reduced to a travesty of their mandate

Since 1980 different pieces of legislations have been enacted for environmental conservation. These include the Forest (Conservation) Act (fca), 1980, the Environmental Protection Act (epa), 1986 and the Biological Diversity Act (bda), 2002. These have the potential to strengthen the conservation agenda.