Ecological Restoration Alliance

Meet the team! Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) are the first to experience the impacts of environmental degradation, and they have been at the forefront of resistance, adaptation, and restoration for generations. The IPLC Desk, housed at Keystone Foundation in collaboration with the Ecological Restoration Alliance – India, aims to bridge the gap between community-led wisdom and scientific restoration practices. By fostering meaningful exchanges between IPLCs and restoration practitioners, we seek to amplify Indigenous knowledge, strengthen networks, and ensure that restoration efforts are truly inclusive and community-driven. Their deep connection to the land and generations of stewardship make them invaluable leaders in restoring our ecosystems. Keystone Foundation

I would like people to engage on this. Recently i heard that an acre of miyawaki plantation costs anything between 25-64 lakhs. Our annual budget for ecological restoraton of the Aravali Biodiversity park was Rs. 60 lakhs for 350+ acreas. I have been noticing a miyawaki patch on the floodplains of Yamuna since 2019, on my way back home. There were some 15 species of trees that were planted with lots of shrubs. Now manily Babool dominates the patch, with such density and thin trunk many are falling due to the weight of climbers on them. Ecological Restoration Alliance, Pranay Lal, Bharati Chaturvedi

Meet the team! Over the last several months, the core team for the ERA has grown. We are now 14 individuals, housed across different organisations and places, all working in tandem, to make ecological restoration a more accessible field. The expanded team would be working across 8 crucial aspects, in the capacity of desks for the alliance. First up, the Secretariat. For any alliance to function correctly, its administrative and logistical aspects must be seamless. Our secretariat – housed at our institutional partners, Nature Conservation Foundation and Keystone Foundation – ensures the coordination between the desks, the larger systemic functioning and the finances of the alliance run smoothly. Nature Conservation Foundation Keystone Foundation Arjun Singh Marishia Rodrigues

We invite you to our next webinar: Forest Restoration: A Case Study from Central India  – where Kedar Girish Gore will share his team's journey of and learnings from restoring over 2500 hectares of central India's forests. ------- Please note that you will have to register for the event through the link shared here. The link to join the webinar will be shared post registration. ------- About the webinar: Between 2017-2024, The Corbett Foundation (TCF) undertook ecological restoration of around 2,500 hectares of land in Satpura Tiger Reserve, Kanha Tiger Reserve and North Shahdol Forest Division (Bandhavgarh Sanjay Dubri Corridor, Madhya Pradesh). These projects were undertaken in partnership with Madhya Pradesh Forest Department and required a careful balancing act between ecological restoration of forest areas and the grazing needs of village communities living near them. Today, several wild species, including tigers, have been recorded at these restoration sites, while people from the villages nearby harvest grass to stall-feed their livestock. In this webinar, Kedar Gore will share TCF’s journey so far while mediating and navigating the needs of the local communities and of the local environment, all the while maintaining a working relationship with the Forest Department. Join us as he highlights the challenges they faced along the way, and shares his learnings and best practices. About the speaker: Kedar Gore has three decades of experience in nature conservation, environmental education, human-wildlife coexistence and environmental sustainability. Since 2009, he has been the Director of The Corbett Foundation, implementing holistic wildlife conservation programmes across many wilderness landscapes of India.

The Ecological Restoration Alliance brings you the February edition of its newsletter. As always, it has updates from members of the restoration community doing interesting things in different ecoregions – documenting biodiversity and other parameters at a polluted wetland at the heart of a city, conducting tree phenology studies at a national park, sharing learnings from personal experiments with planting native species, and rewilding formerly forested elephant migration corridors in West Bengal. It also features a few work and grant opportunities currently open in the restoration space, two new ecoregion documents that we've published, and a few other updates. Happy reading: https://lnkd.in/dGhgYSFz

Our Steering Committee (SC) essentially leads the Ecological Restoration Alliance-India. Comprising of seasoned restoration practitioners, the committee guides the direction of the alliance and ensures that we meet milestones – small and big – to make ecological restoration a more accessible in India. Our SC members each have decades of experience working in diverse landscapes and ecoregions, making the committee the polestar for the work that is carried out from the core team of ERA-India.

We were joined last month by Dr Donald Flickinger on our first webinar of the year, on the dam removal project carried out on the Klamath river in the United States. Dr Flickinger spoke of the ecology and the climate of the 500 km long Klamath river watershed, and its aquatic life cycles that got interrupted by four hydropower dams a century ago. He also touched upon the degradation brought on by the California gold rush, before meandering into the realm of socio-politics and the extensive consensus building that had to be facilitated before everyone agreed to the decommissioning. Dr Flickinger spent quite a bit of time here explaining the investment needed in the stakeholder process and the challenges that came along, also outlining the role of government employees in brokering a resolution. The audience was also treated to a music video, and several pictures depicting what dam removal actually looks like. The pictures eventually showed the reintroduction of native vegetation on the newly exposed reservoir beds, and the return of the migratory fish upriver. Towards the end, his presentation covered alternatives to large dams, and closed with another video capturing the free flowing waters reclaiming the Klamath basin for the first time in over a hundred years. The Q-A session that followed led to more discussion on social engineering, the role played by the tribes in this process, the effect of the California wildfires, technicalities of fish ladders and handling dam debris, whether the US plans to decommission more dams. Dr Flickinger also shared the three factors he feels are important to consider before decommissioning a dam.A recording of this webinar is now available on our youtube channel. You can watch it here: https://lnkd.in/gvm4JvDr

Hello! We've had a few hundred of you follow us in the last few months, and we thought an introduction was due. At ERA, our core goal is to help anyone working or wanting to work in the restoration space. This could be by providing information on different species, closest native nurseries and best practices; or simply by putting you in touch with the right people to collaborate with or learn from. Write us an email or drop us a message with your smallest and biggest queries on restoration. And if you would like to learn more and get involved, visit era-india.org

Last couple of days to register for this workshop. If you're a fresh graduate or have just begun your professional restoration journey, here's a chance to learn from seasoned practitioners working in different geographies and ecoregions across the country.

We invite you for our first webinar this year, on Bringing a River Back To Life - Socio Ecological Impacts of a Century of Dams and their Removal ------- Please note that you will have to register for the event through the link shared here. The link to join the webinar will be shared post registration. ------- About the Webinar: The largest dam removal project ever undertaken was completed in October 2024 in the United States of America. As a result, the waters of the Klamath river in California are flowing freely into the Pacific for the first time since 1918. In this webinar from the other side of the globe, Dr Donald Flickinger brings to us the story of large-scale healing and restoration taking place in the Klamath river basin following the demolition of four hydropower dams. Join us as he highlights the impacts of gold mining and dam construction from the lens of ecology, then outlines their impacts on the indigenous tribes of the Klamath basin. His talk will also give us a glimpse into the slow, 25 year long process of consensus building and cooperation among 26 stakeholder groups –  including the indigenous tribes, the farmers, the power corporations and the US government – that finally led to the removal of the dams. Dr Flickinger will also address the question of restoration of a river basin recovering from a century of submergence and sedimentation, show us the changes underway in the basin and discuss the challenges involved in his socio-political landscape. About the Speaker: Dr Donald Flickinger is a Biologist and Natural Resource Management Specialist retired from NOAA Fisheries (The US government body tasked with the stewardship and management of fish, other marine life, and their habitats), California. He is now involved in urban stream and floodplain restoration via his board membership of non-profits Siskiyou Gardens Parks and Greenways Association in Yreka, California. Dr Flickinger was a member of the Klamath Stakeholder negotiation process that brought together 26 stakeholder entities to painstakingly work through conflicting interests and decide on removing the dams on the river. His doctoral dissertation examining the rehabilitation of degraded moist tropical forests in India’s Western Ghats brought him to Sirsi, Karnataka. Here he investigated multiple-species silviculture as a means to rehabilitate tropical forests. Dr Flickinger has also worked as a Field Director for British Oxfam in Indonesia. #Ecologicalrestoration #Undamntheklamath #riverrestoration #damremoval  #habitatrestoration #cooperation