Not more than two decades ago, I played with snails on rainy days and would see them crawling abundantly on plants. My friends and I would collect them in glass bottles, treating them as pets.

It appears that snails have almost vanished from our gardens. Lush green landscapes and trees have dwindled to become a few patches of green separated by tall buildings in between.

Researchers find a greater abundance but an altered epiphyte community in selectively logged forests

The detailed analysis of the stomach contents of two frogs provide evidence that frogs do play an important role in protecting crops against insects. 

Research Matters caught up with Dr M D Madhusudan, one of the researchers involved in developing a high-resolution map of Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs) in India, to gain insights into their work. Here are excerpts from the interview.

Researchers from ATREE review their work over the past 25 years.

Study highlights why capture-neuter-vaccinate-release is not effective in reducing free-ranging dogs.

^{An aerial view of the Tungabhadra dam in Karnataka [Image Credits: Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay]}

As winter sets in over Punjab, one can hear the humdrum of hundreds of machines harvesting rice across lakhs of hectares of paddy fields. In Maharashtra, villages in Vidarbha lug their snowy cotton harvest to the market. Years ago, these landscapes were a sprawling array of forests, grasslands, wetlands and multiple crops cultivated on a shifting basis.

Mud snails, also known as mystery snails, live in freshwater and belong to a snail family called Viviparidae. They are found throughout the world except in South America and Antarctica. Such globally distributed species incite interesting questions about their dispersal across different continents. In a recent study, researchers in Bengaluru from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), investigated manifestation of these mystery snails in India.

Researchers from two Bengaluru-based institutes—the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), have studied the distribution and the impact of protected marine areas on Bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum) in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. After months of data collection by scuba diving and capturing underwater photographs of the seafloor, their findings have now been published in the journal Oryx.