49 Ramsar sites in india
✅ World Wetlands Day (2-Feb) celebrated at Sultanpur National Park.
List of Ramsar Sites in India up to 49:
✅ Khijadiya Wildlife Sanctuary in Gujarat and Bakhira Wildlife Sanctuary in UP have been added to the List of Ramsar Sites.
✅ India now has a network of 49 Ramsar sites covering an area of 10,93,636 hectares, the highest in South Asia.
Bakhira Wildlife Sanctuary :
✅It is a natural flood plain wetland situated in Sant Kabir Nagar District of UP.
✅ It was established in 1980.
✅ Expanding over an area of 29 sq. km, the Bakhira Wildlife Sanctuary provides wintering and staging grounds for a number of waterfowls and a breeding ground for resident birds.
✅ It is especially important for providing wintering grounds for a large number of species of the Central Asian Flyway.
✅ Examples of species supported by the sanctuary include Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), the vulnerable greater spotted eagle (Aquila clanga), common pochard (Aythya ferina) and swamp francolin (Francolinus gularis), and the near-threatened oriental darter (Anhinga melanogaster) and woolly-necked stork (Ciconia episcopus).
Khijadiya Wildlife Sanctuary :
✅ Khijadiya, which is part of the Central Asian Flyway, has become the fourth wetland of Gujarat to get the Ramsar tag.
✅ It is a freshwater wetland near the coast of the Gulf of Kutch, which was formed following the creation of a bund (dike) in 1920 by the then ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Nawanagar to protect farmlands from saltwater ingress.
✅ The sanctuary is now part of Marine National Park, Jamnagar, the first marine national park in the country.
✅ As one of the important waterbird habitats in North-West India, the Site provides breeding, feeding and roosting grounds for a wide range of resident aquatic and also land-based birds.
✅ It provides habitat for over 310 bird species, including 125 waterbirds; over 165,000 individual waterbirds have been counted.
✅ Examples of species found here include the endangered Pallas’s fish-eagle (Haliaeetus leucoryphus) and Indian skimmer (Rynchops albicollis), and the vulnerable common pochard (Aythya ferina).
♻️ Additional information:
✅ The Minister also released the National Wetland Decadal Change Atlas on the occasion.
✅ The atlas highlights the changes whic h have happened in Wetlands across the country in the past decade.
✅ The atlas has been prepared by the Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad.
✅ The original Atlas was released by SAC in 2011 and has over the years been used extensively by all the State Governments also in their planning processes
Watch Geography video lecture.