Q.Describe the various methods of biodiversity conservation.

Once you know a species or a region needs protecting, how do you actually protect it? The chapter lays out two fundamentally different strategies, plus the frameworks used to decide who needs help most urgently.

In situ conservation — protecting a species inside its own natural habitat — is the preferred approach whenever it's possible, captured in the chapter's own memorable line: we save the entire forest to save the tiger. Since resources are always limited, conservationists concentrate this effort on biodiversity hotspots: regions with very high species richness and a high degree of endemism (species found nowhere else) that are also losing habitat fast. There are 34 such hotspots worldwide, three of them in India (Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, Indo-Burma, and the Himalaya) — and although together they cover less than 2% of Earth's land, protecting them strictly could cut ongoing mass extinctions by almost 30%. India backs this up with a real network: 14 biosphere reserves, 90 national parks, and 448 wildlife sanctuaries (like Kaziranga, the one place the one-horned rhinoceros calls home) — plus a much older, community-driven form of in-situ protection in sacred groves. …