The women guarding India's rainforest 'refugees'

As deforestation and climate change ravage India's UNESCO heritage-listed Western Ghats mountain range, an all-female rainforest force is battling to protect one of the area's last enclaves of biodiversity.

The region is home to at least 325 globally threatened flora, fauna, bird, amphibian, reptile and fish species but the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has ranked its outlook as a "significant concern".

But at Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary a group of 27 women act as guardians of the rare ferns, tree-hugging mosses and thousands of other plants that may otherwise be lost forever.

"We are trying to salvage what is possible. It is like a refugee camp," said Suprabha Seshan, one of the curators at the reserve.

It is also like a hospital.

"The intensive care unit is in the pots and then when you take them out that's like the general ward where they get other forms of primary health care," Seshan added.

She estimated that more than 90 percent of the forests once graced the area have disappeared, a situation she describes as an ecological "holocaust".

Gurukula was created as a haven for the native flora struggling for survival because of global warming and human encroachment, in the hope of slowly repopulating the region with indigenous plants.

India's Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary was created as a haven for the native flora struggling for survival because of global warming and human encroachment, in the hope of slowly repopulating the region with indigenous plants. Manjunath Kiran AFP

It said: "50 million people are estimated to live in the Western Ghats region, resulting in pressures that are orders of magnitude greater than many protected areas around the world."

Seshan, who has worked at the sanctuary for 28 years, has seen things deteriorate first hand.

She recalled: "When I came here plastic was still not a part of our culture. I remember when Wolfgang found the first plastic bag in the river, he said: 'civilization has arrived'."

Transplant success

Fighting off bloodsucking leeches that thrive in the humidity, the rainforest gardeners tend to a multitude of endangered ferns, flowers and herbs that grow around the rocks and in the shade of tropical trees.

The small plants of the Western Ghats are vulnerable to rising temperatures, rainfall fluctuations and the loss of habitat, said Seshan.

"The more the climate changes, the more their reproductive life strategies have to change to adapt."