Butterfly Gardening: A tool to ensure inclusive development and participatory conservation.
Mode of Presentation: Poster
Conference Name: Young Conservation Scientists (YCS 2017)
Year: 2017
Area: Entomofauna
Authors: Sarika Baidya, Devsena Roychaudhury, Namrata Das, Chaitali Roy, Tarun Karmakar and Arjan Basu Roy
Abstract
Conservation of wild-biodiversity is a prime concern in today’s world. The level of destruction is such huge that, only governmental initiatives are not enough to regain the situation in its right shape. Also it is important to involve common people to intensify the effort of conservation as well. Our butterfly gardening project is based on conservation of native plant in large or small scale, with supportive data of already existing butterfly species of the area to be developed as a garden. With this idea, we have created three gardens in recent time one adjacent to the forest (Ramsai Butterfly Conservatory) and two in the heart of Kolkata (Banabitan Biodiversity Park, Saltlake and Eco-park, Rajarhat). The result shows that all the gardens have become a reservoir for plants (mostly native and some well adopted exotic) around 60 species and have managed to attract hundreds of butterflies belonging to almost 80 species, out of which almost 55 species are regularly doing their life cycle within the garden premises. (All data were kept on a daily basis for early stages, for butterflies point count data were kept on a weekly basis throughout the last three years.) During the past three years thousands of people have visited those gardens. Hence a mass awareness on Butterfly, utility of native plants and creation of home butterfly gardens were made. These projects have created habitat, conserved plants and butterflies and have spread awareness among common people, which is its primary objective.