Ramsar Sites in India

India, on its 75th year of Independence (15th August), achieved a milestone of 75 Ramsar sites. 

It recently added 11 more wetlands to the list of Ramsar sites to make total 75 Ramsar sites covering an area of 13 lakh 26 thousand 677 Hectare in the country. 

I have created an interactive map. Kindly visit the map at https://andybandra.github.io/ramsar_india/ You can see and click the map shown below.

On the map you may click an icon to get the name and state of a site, and its area in hectares.  

India is one of the Contracting Parties to Ramsar Convention, signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971. India signed it on 1st February 1982. These are wetlands deemed to be of "international importance" under the Ramsar Convention.

What is RAMSAR Wetland Sites

The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands, recognizing the fundamental ecological functions of wetlands and their economic, cultural, scientific, and recreational value.

Tamil Nadu has the highest number of Ramsar Sites in India with 14 Ramsar Sites. The largest site is marked in blue icon. It is the Sundarbans National Park a national park, tiger reserve and biosphere reserve in West Bengal,

The list is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ramsar_sites_in_India.

75 Ramsar India Sites

KeralaDay3

Kerala Day 3

Periyar Tiger Reserve

We started from Munnar. We came down a moutain range and climed up another. I did not note down the geo locations while coming down and hence those are missing. While we did not see tigers and elephants we did see the following. Great cormorant, Woolly-necked stork, Sambar deer, Bengal monitor, White-throated kingfisher, Brahminy Kite and Gaur.
Please see the photos my facebook.

The path taken

The above interactive visualization was made using Python and Folium. I wanted to make a visualization with Folium for last 2 years!
The folium library in turn uses the leaflet library to render the web-page visualisation. Using Folium I do not have to worry about the HTML, CSS, Javascript code! Plus Python allows me to hold my data in pandas and manupulation of the data becomes convenient. Customizing markers and icons becomes easy using both the pandas and folium libraries.

Folium was not part of the standard Anaconda distribution. It had to be downloaded by using the following command.
$ conda install folium -c conda-forge
at the Anaconda promo. But before that I created a separate environment for folium (folium_project) by closing the base environment. The command was
$ conda create --name folium_project --clone base

Folium allows one to leverage the power of leaflet by just writing a few lines of code. The web-page visualization including its code is on my github account.