Lantana
Lantana camara is an invasive weed that has spread through many forest ecosystems across India. It was brought into India (Calcutta) in 1809 as an ornamental shrub from South America. It is now one of the world’s worst weeds and is a huge threat to native plants and animals
The Crisis
A Landscape Under Siege
Lantana camara is the world’s most widely distributed invasive plant. It arrived in India in 1809, planted as a garden ornamental from South America, and has since spread across more than 300,000 square kilometres of Indian forests — including roughly a third of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. It outcompetes every native plant, its toxins make it inedible for herbivores, it restricts plant and tree growth through allelopathy and forms thickets so dense and thorny that even large animals can’t move through them.
Every attempt at lantana removal has failed. Cut it down and it grows back faster. Dig up the roots and its dormant seeds germinate in the disturbed soil. The cost of lantana removal at scale runs to many thousands of crores for the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve alone.
For close to twenty years, we have been looking for ways in which communities can use the plant — and we think we are close to cracking this problem. Through life-size Lantana elephants that travel the world, and through biochar that leverages carbon finance to fund ongoing removal and restoration, we are building a model that can work at scale.
What We’re Doing
A community-based approach to ongoing, self-financing Lantana removal and grass/forest restoration
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Quantifying Lantana density across the landscape — developing rigorous methods to map and measure the problem
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We have created a mechanised (even partially mechanised in some landscapes) way to uproot lantana and immediately create biochar out of it.
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Using drones, bioacoustics, and traditional knowledge from the indigenous communities who live around these landscapes to monitor forest regeneration after removal
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Building a native grass nursery, with seeds collected through a local community network, to restore the native grassy understory that Lantana has displaced
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Training and building the capacity of indigenous communities to lead the removal process
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Working with partners to create a self-financing pipeline: removing Lantana, restoring native grassy understory, building indigenous livelihoods, and monitoring progress with both high-end technology and traditional ecological knowledge.
We have also worked with local communities on a
Lantana Furniture Project.
With initial inputs from ATREE in 2009, and working in collaboration with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department and the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam, we launched an initiative to help local indigenous (Adivasi) communities use this weed to make furniture.
