Why in news
Lantana being an invasive plant is known to envelop and ‘entangle other plants by forming a dense thicket, and spread on the forest floor as a scrambling shrub’.
To help tackle this, a few organisations have been actively clearing the weed in certain pockets and employing locals to craft furniture, decor artefacts, and even sculptures.
Lantana
Lantana camara is a perennial shrub native to the American tropics and belongs to the Verbenaceae family.
With the ability to adapt to the changing climate, lantana can tolerate high temperature and moisture.
Lantana camara, a flowering shrub, among the world’s top 10 invasive species, was introduced to India as an ornamental plant in the early 1800s.
Since, it has taken over entire ecosystems, and eaten into forests across the country.
As per reports, ‘multiple hybrid varieties of lantana were brought to India and over the 200 years of its introduction, the varieties have hybridised and formed a complex’.
In forest areas at the National scale, total lantana infestation is 40% of India’s forests, more than four times the combined area of all tiger reserves in the country
It contains the toxins, Lantanadene A and B in the leaves, making it inedible for all herbivores, so significant biodiversity reduction occurs in forests and increasing human-wildlife conflict as animals are pushed outside forests.
In the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve at the core of the Western Ghats, the area of dense infestation is around 2000 sq.km.
The first eradication plan for India was in 1916, in the forests of Coorg (Karnataka) and Benna (Mudumalai/TN), and all efforts since then have failed, both in India and around world
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