Farmland Biodiversity

More than 4.8 billion hectares—over one-third of the world’s land—are used for agriculture. Conservation therefore cannot end at the boundaries of forests and protected areas; biodiversity also has to persist in the landscapes where people grow food and live. Sahapur sits within West Bengal’s intensively cultivated lower-Gangetic landscape, where paddy fields and irrigation channels form a patchwork of potential habitat. We are studying how birds, amphibians and mammals use this agricultural matrix—and which small pieces of habitat allow wildlife to persist within it.

Sahapur is also a field learning site for Habitat Robotics. We are bringing together camera traps, drone-based orthomosaic mapping and low-power environmental sensors to observe the same landscape from multiple perspectives. Sahapur is where we repeatedly test the full loop from sensor deployment → field data → AI interpretation → ecological analysis → better deployment. Each field season helps refine monitoring approaches that can be adapted to larger conservation deployments.