Restoring India’s tiger habitats from lantana’s grip

Contrarily, it’s also a near-identical match to cane and is showing up as a primary raw material for furniture. That being said, its negative influence on local ecosystems, underground and above ground, stands at a 90:10 ratio compared to the benefits it brings. Its deceptive lushness has the destructive tendency to declare thriving biodiverse biomes biologically dead. We’re talking approximately 300,000 km² of invaded forested area, that also includes nearly 44% of India’s tiger habitats. Let’s break down the 90:10 benefit-to-harm nature of this invasive species.

Ecological displacement (90% harm)

Some attacks by lantana camara have time and again tested ecological ceilings of forest ecosystems:

Choking flora habitats: This ecological, sunlight-hungry invader starts a chemical warfare that causes a major drop in ecosystem resilience. Small, orange-yellow plants eventually grow into crowded, thorny thickets. The jampacked, monospecific formations hog on the nutrients and elements necessary for native vegetation to continue growing.

What’s more, their uncontrollable proliferation turns healthy forests into choking ‘green deserts’ deprived of genetic and functional diversity. Overall, research shows a worrying drop in species richness of everything from trees to shrub understories.

Considering that bird species eat lantana berries, they are carriers of these seeds across large forest areas. Such bird-mediated dispersal is counterproductive to eradication efforts as the seeds remain dormant in the soil for over 10 years. Persistence of these seed banks means new lantana plants can appear after the initial removal of mature bushes.

Highly flammable: Reaching up to 20 meters in some Central Indian Highlands, their broad cover restricts sunlight from reaching the forest floor. While this lets lantanas keep invading, what’s worse is the flammability of their green state. As the foliage catches fire, the high volatile-oil content of lantanas intensifies combustion, earning it the title of ‘green fire.’

What’s worse, scattered piles of dry thickets double down on fuel load near the forest surface. This enables the fires to spread at a catalysed speed and take over large canopies. Not to forget, invading dry areas and displacing native plant communities can dangerously alter the fire patterns in small to large ecosystems. With heat waves often falling upon India’s poor positioning against climate change, the dryness of forests makes lantanas tougher to tackle.

Forest and grazing disruption: When a plant, invasive enough to reach tree height, sprouts into its natural ‘takeover’ personality, ecosystem services and ecological corridors start facing suppression.

The swiftness with which lantanas replace native pasture grasses doesn’t match up with the natural pace at which livestock herds find new feeding spots. Alarmingly enough, the inedibility of these sharp, woody shrubs comes from their poisonous triterpenoids. This means cattle, goats, and sheep all go from sickness to escapism from these taken-over habitats.

Lantana leaves house toxins called pentacyclic triterpenoids that can kill livestock in two to four days. Another side effect of this is the extended repercussions on herbivore and predator food chains:

-    Native vegetation areas start to be covered in densely invaded thickets
-    Herbivores like deer and boar are forced to starve or migrate for grazing
-    Some herbivores lean on forage in agricultural areas, and this causes huge crop losses
-    Tigers stay put and wait for prey near forest edges and disturbed forest regions
-    Human settlements exist on these forest fringes and enter into human-wildlife conflicts

Large-scale removal projects work on uprooting and cut root-stock (CRS) methods during the winter season.

Threat to climate resilience: The systemic risks this invasive species poses to India’s long-term climate goals are clear as day. In fact, this local biological issue ends up harming our global carbon and climate resilience frameworks as well.

For example, even though lantana is green and grows rapidly, it’s a pretty poor substitute for forest carbon sinks like hardwood trees and wetlands. It never reaches the prime state of big, decades- and centuries-old trees that store large amounts of carbon. Starving saplings keep forests in a malnourished and stunted, low-carbon condition.

One important perspective is how this biological barrier penalises our natural carbon sequestration mechanisms. Thus, habitat restoration projects must also factor in protecting the integrity of carbon offset projects rather than just ‘saving tigers.’

Secondly, the fire-adapted woody properties of lantanas give birth to positive feedback loops. The plants act as a ladder fuel that carries ground fires high into canopies, creating crown fires. These same canopies with mature trees would generally survive a low-intensity fire. Also, as the fires kill other plants, they create a self-feeding cycle that gives it more space to grow. Factually, as undeniable signs of climate change call for drier seasons and higher temperatures with erratic rainfall, lantanas are comfortably marking their territories with overgrowth.

Bio-economy of waste to wealth (10% benefit)

A pro-adaptive perspective can turn the narrative of these invasives into a solution for greater social equity and circular-economy applications. More than a lost cause, all the woody lantana stems and branches are essentially lignocellulosic biomass. 
Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant renewable raw material on Earth and is key to 2nd-generation biofuels and bioplastics.

Careful mass-scale extraction could employ Indigenous communities and also align with SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production). It’s equivalent to meeting the demand for virgin timber and fuel without cutting down a single native tree. This concept of above-ground forest mining guarantees the use of invasive biomass as a raw industrial material. For instance, biomass waste is processed into biochar or green fuel pellets. This means less vertical fuel continuity and better de-risking for long-term carbon sequestration and biodiversity growth.

Indigenous South Indian communities, such as the Soliga and Bettakurumba tribes, extract and treat these woody stems. The treated biomass goes through artisanal processes to create high-end, fair-trade furniture and artifacts. This is a social license to operate and sustain a livelihood throughout the year for forest locals.

The most viable success of this bio-economy is the creation of life-sized Lantana elephant structures by the Real Elephant Collective and Shola Trust. Such a storytelling attempt via manmade art became a globally recognised symbol of conservation. New York, London, Bangalore, and Texas; large city populations were made aware of how elephants are losing their natural corridors to such invasive species. Even King Charles and Queen Camila have purchased a series of these lantana-made elephants for their private country estate in Highgrove Gardens. Indeed, 250 lantana-made elephants have raised over $3m in sales.

In short, this is a market-based restoration model. The art funds the labour. The labourer removes the weed. The forest regenerates naturally.

Finding the right balance

Dealing with India’s lantana crisis needs us to move beyond the binary of total eradication versus passive acceptance. We must try acknowledging that while Lantana’s ecological "tax" on our forests is unsustainably high, its 10% utility provides a part of the economic engine needed to fund its removal.

An inclusive approach from hereon is integrated invasive management. This means treating the bio-economy as a craft industry and as a large-scale ecological utility. Scaling the forest mining model lets us relook such biological threats as a solution for social equity and climate resilience.

Ultimately, the goal is to shift the 90:10 ratio in favour of the forest by using the plant’s own biomass to finance the return of the native hardwoods that are the true guardians of our carbon and our tigers.

Karandeep Arora is an ex-engineer turned communications expert, long-form writer and author, who now works as an operations SME for a leading LLM.

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