Since 1930, areas of state-managed forest in the central Himalayas of India have increasingly been devolved to management by local communities. This article studies the long-run effects of the devolution on the cost of forest management and on forest conservation. Village council-management costs an order of magnitude less per unit area and does no worse, and possibly better, at conservation than state management. Geographic proximity and historical and ecological information are used to separate the effects of management from those of possible confounding factors.community management ͉ degradation ͉ forests ͉ impact evaluation C onserving wild areas in developing countries is generally less costly and has higher benefits in terms of biological diversity than doing the same in developed countries (1). However, national governments in developing countries may not find forest conservation economically justifiable, even though it may be so at local and global scales (2). Transfers from developed to developing countries for forest conservation may give rise to perverse incentives and are not easy to negotiate, monitor, and implement (3, 4). In this context, cost-effective conservation of tropical forests assumes importance.Tropical forests were largely nationalized during and after the colonial era, but over the past 2 decades, many governments, partly motivated by budgetary concerns, have been experimenting with decentralized management (5-8). Case studies suggest that community management of natural resources can be effective for sustainable use (8-10). However, because decentralization is often accompanied by political, economic, and ecological changes, its impact on forest conservation is hard to disentangle from that of confounding factors. A recent review of studies of the impact of decentralized management concluded that none of them identified the impact of decentralization on forest degradation (5).This article measures the effect of devolution of control of forests to village councils in the Indian central Himalayas on forest conservation and its cost. Forests in the region were nationalized early in the twentieth century. In 1930, approximately a decade after nationalization, and in response to widespread unrest, villages were permitted to carve out councilmanaged forests both from common lands not nationalized and from nationalized forests. The area under village council management has gradually expanded since then to cover approximately one-third of the forest area in the hill region of what is now the state of Uttarakhand.We use government data to find the cost per hectare of managing state forests and our survey data to find the cost per hectare of council forest management. We find that state forests cost at least 7 times as much per hectare to administer as do council-managed forests. Second, we compare the extent of degradation in state forests with that in council forests and find that the difference is small and not statistically significant. These findings are the basis for our conclusion that c...

BackgroundThis paper describes a growing biodiversity platform, launched in 2008, which organizes knowledge on the biodiversity of India. The main objective and originality of the India Biodiversity Portal (IBP) is to aggregate curated biodiversity data of different kinds (e.g. distribution maps, temporal distribution or life history) in an integrated platform where amateurs and experts can easily interact.New informationSince its launch, the platform has seen an exceptional increase in both user activity and biodiversity data. Currently the portal has descriptions of over 20,400 species, and has aggregated approximately 1,280,000 observations covering more than 30,000 species, which already constitutes a unique source of information for scientists and stakeholders in conservation. Over 8500 users have registered on the portal. The amount of data generated and to be generated in the next few years by this portal will certainly help the effective implementation of biodiversity conservation and management in one of the most ecologically diverse countries in the world.

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