North Bank Landscape

The Region

The North East India presents a landscape of lush evergreen forests and grasslands which provides home to a plethora of species like the Asian elephants, Indian Rhinoceros, tiger, leopard etc. Estimates point out that this region provides refuge to a sizeable population of the Asian elephants, about 40% of the entire Indian and nearly 10% of the world population.

However the very survival of this species is under threat due to expanding human population, and the consequent expansion of agriculture, jhum or the shifting agriculture, unplanned clearance for the human settlements, logging and other development activities like construction of roads and railways.

The population is also continuously dwindling because of continued poaching and other natural calamities like floods and diseases etc. Since elephants constantly come in conflict with the human population, destroying their crops and settlements, the growing needs for productive lands for human use has eroded the traditional support for the elephant conservation.

Project Development
The largest and the most contiguous population of the Asian elephants is found along the North Banks of the river Brahmaputra covering parts of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, North Bengal and Bhutan.The urgent need for preserving this habitat has been addressed by the WWF under their AREAS Programme.

The NBL defines the area between the northern bank of the river Brahmaputra in the south to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas in the north and the river manas in the west to the river Dibang in the east.

The NBL contains an area of about 3000 sq.km. of Protected Areas and may contain upto 3000 elephants.

Importance of the region
The NBL is one of the most important sites for the Asian elephant. However the ecological importance of this region goes far beyond the single species level. It is a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot and one of WWF's Global 200 eco-regions.

Overlapping Manas-Namdhapa Tiger Conservation unit, it encompasses several WWF Tiger Conservation Project sites and is considered one of the key sites for WWF’s strategy for eco-region based conservation. NBL includes a number of Protected Areas and presents an ideal opportunity for proactive conservation measures.

Goal
To project aims to secure the NBL elephant population for the long term by maintaining habitat contiguity, significantly reducing existing and potential threats and building professional and public support for conservation of the population and its habitat.