Environment › Species in news
Plants, insects and newly described species
Plants, fungi, insects and the other species with no theme of their own, species newly described or rediscovered in India, and the ideas that tie species to ecosystems, such as keystone species and pollination. Prelims has asked what follows from a fall in butterfly populations and which organism performs the waggle dance.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2017: consequences of a fall in butterfly populations
Showing 1 of 3 subjects, those that changed from 1 to 15 August 2026.Show all
Ecoacoustics
Copy link to EcoacousticsPrelims and Mains
Ecoacoustics reads distribution, abundance and behaviour off sound, which is what works in dense forest where little can be seen.
- India's first open access ecoacoustic dataset holds nearly 100 hours of soundscapes recorded by ecologists and enthusiasts since 2025.
- It covers birds, insects, frogs, bats, reptiles and marine animals.
- Machine learning models that identify a species by its call have until now been trained mostly on Global North recordings.
- Being crowdsourced and open, the dataset can train those models on Indian calls rather than borrowed ones.