- A study of “giant” trees in India’s Western Ghats finds that sacred groves, forest patches that communities protect, because they believe the trees belong to their gods, hold nearly twice the giant-tree species of nearby villages.
- The groves also grow far more young trees from large, bird-spread seeds, making them nurseries for the next forest.
- Researchers call giant trees “ecological catcher’s mitts” and say conservation should protect whole forests and the cultures around them, not just single animals.
- The groves are under pressure as simple forest shrines are replaced with concrete temples and young people leave villages, taking their knowledge with them.
In the villages of India’s Western Ghats, some of the oldest and tallest trees do not grow inside a national park. They grow in sacred groves, small patches of old, mostly untouched forest that local communities have protected for generations, because they believe the trees belong to their deities and ancestors.
A new study published in the journal PLOS One found that young trees regenerate far more successfully in these groves. Seeds dropped by fruit-eating birds are much likelier to survive and grow there than in surrounding farms and villages. India has more than 100,000 sacred groves, which are recognized as essential to community-based conservation.
The Western Ghats is a mountain range that runs about 1,600 kilometers (nearly 1,000 miles) down India’s west coast, across six states. The study began there by chance. A team from the Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF), which runs a giant-tree program, had signed up a man in Vanzole village with a huge Terminalia bellirica (beheda) tree in his yard. Visiting, they saw giant trees all over the village.
“It sparked a series of questions,” study co-author Kevin Matteson, associate director of Project Dragonfly at Miami University in the U.S. state of Ohio, told Mongabay in an email. How many giant trees were hiding in plain sight, and were birds like hornbills really using trees in such busy places?
To find out, the team walked the whole village with two local experts, Namdev and Anant Shivgan, who mapped the land, identified the trees and led the team to four sacred groves.
“We can use scientific methods to measure the girth of a trunk,” wrote the study’s first author Omkar Pai, who conducted the field research, “but … it is the local knowledge holders who actually map the memory and unique functions of the forest.”
The team measured 82 giant, old-growth trees (those more than 1 meter (3.2 feet) around) from 20 species. The sacred groves held more variety and 12 species grew only in the groves.
In the villages, people planted mango (Mangifera indica) and jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) for their fruit, and those trees dominated. In the groves, beheda, a medicinal tree, and several others were more common.
“Settlements are curated orchards, while sacred groves are ecological time capsules,” Matteson said.
Grove trees grew tall, reaching for light among competitor plants, while village trees spread into wide crowns and thick trunks.
Once a tree passes one meter, Matteson said, it “graduates from being a competitor in the forest to becoming a host.” Giant trees act as “ecological catcher’s mitts,” pulling in hornbills (birds) that then spread seeds across the land. Big trees offer the strong branches, thick crowns and hollows that large animals need. A great hornbill cannot perch on a sapling. Watching one try, said Jayant Sarnaik, AERF’s joint director, is like “watching an adult try to balance on a toddler’s plastic chair.”
Giant trees in both the groves and the villages attract fruit-eating birds like hornbills, which drop seeds under them. But there is a difference in what happens to most of the seeds afterward. In the sacred groves, the ground is less disturbed (no livestock, no foot trails, no cleared undergrowth) so the dropped seeds are more likely to sprout and survive into young trees.
In the villages, far fewer make it. That’s why the groves regenerate the next generation of trees (especially the big-seeded ones only large birds can carry) far better than the farmland around them.
The team counted saplings under each giant tree, focusing on two species whose seeds are dispersed by fruit-eating birds that deposit them in their droppings. Saplings of the fishtail palm (Caryota urens) grew under 91% of grove trees but only 47% of village trees. For Strychnos nux-vomica, a tree with large fruit eaten mostly by hornbills, the gap was wider: Saplings grew under 77% of grove trees but just 5% in villages.
India’s groves are often protected by rules against cutting trees, tied to Hindu, Buddhist or animist belief. Ditro Wibisono Wardi Parikesit, an ecologist who has studied forests in Indonesian Borneo protected by spiritual beliefs (and was not part of the India study) compared the systems. Both, he told Mongabay, “create relatively undisturbed refuges within a broader landscape,” and both rely on belief. “Fear is often viewed negatively, but in this context it can function as a protective force,” he wrote.
Sacred groves in India have no standard size, Pai said. In this study, the groves averaged just 6,587 square meters (70,902 square feet). But even the smallest “serves as a ‘reference forest,’ a living, ecological baseline that shows us what the original, natural biodiversity of that specific region looked like before human modification.”
The groves also work as stepping stones across a wider landscape. AERF recently recorded a Royal Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) and a black leopard (Panthera pardus) in a private forest it helps protect near a tiger reserve. This is a sign, the team said, that large animals depend on the entire landscape mosaic, not on any single reserve.
However, the groves are changing. In some places, simple shrines, sometimes just a few stones set in the forest, are being formalized into concrete temples. “From an ecological perspective, pouring concrete over root zones and clearing underbrush physically removes the nursery habitat,” Pai said.
“Preserving the older, minimalist style of these sacred groves is a profound act of biodiversity conservation,” said Archana Godbole, AERF’s director. “Conservation here isn’t just about drawing a fence around a national park. It’s about actively supporting the communities that maintain these sacred groves … recognizing that preserving this unique cultural heritage is the same work as preserving the region’s ecological network.”
Banner image of a female great hornbill. Photo by Angadachappa via WikiMedia Commons (CC BY SA 4.0)
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Citation:
Pai, O., Sarnaik, J., Godbole, A., Mahajan, G., Gawade, A., & Matteson, K. (2026). Giant trees enhance zoochorous plant dispersal in sacred groves and human settlements of the Western Ghats, India. PLOS One, 21(5), e0343978. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0343978
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Cite this article
Liz Kimbrough (2026). In India’s Western Ghats, sacred groves are better at growing future forests. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-323594Credits
