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Forest loss 2001
2001 Hansen / UMD 2024
Viewpoint
27.5°N · 84.35°E
Inner Terai · Nepal
Key
Map key
Indicative range from habitat rules — not sightings
Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗
Human settlement · 2020
People per 100 m cell
scattered town
no residents
Buffer zone: 273,977 people over 729.4 km² — about 376 per km². Twenty user groups manage 108.9 km² of it as community forest. WorldPop 2020 (constrained) · DNPWC.
Altitude bands · 100–815 m in the park
650–850
450–650
260–450
180–260
100–180
Bands are altitude , not vegetation: sal forest grows on both the valley floor and the Churia slope.
Protection status · Terai Arc
OpenStreetMap
Every boundary on this map is OpenStreetMap geometry (ODbL). No management category is shown: the database that publishes them is not licensed for our use, so rather than assert a category we cannot source, the map draws what open data supports and says so.
Nine of the fifteen Terai Arc reserves are drawn — those with a usable OpenStreetMap boundary. Nepal's Bardia, Banke and Shuklaphanta and the four buffer zones have no open boundary and are named in the text rather than drawn.
Live · forest condition
Deforestation — 30d
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The boundary · the record
Chitwan National Park
A broad basin of 952.6 km² held between two hill ranges and three rivers.
Area 952.6 km² gazetted
Buffer zone 729.4 km² 1996
Boundary 309 km as digitised
Compactness 0.16 Polsby–Popper
Established 1973
Elevation 100 – 815 m
UNESCO World Heritage — inscribed 1984 (criteria vii, ix, x)Nepal's first national park — gazetted 1973; the buffer zone followed in 1996Seven separate years with zero rhino poaching since 2011 — the record that took Chitwan's rhinos from ~95 to 694.
Why this park matters beyond Nepal
Tall alluvial grassland. The riverine grasslands here are among the tallest
on Earth, standing several metres by the end of the monsoon. It is also one of the most
reduced habitats on Earth: the great majority of this ecoregion has been converted to rice
paddy, so what Chitwan holds is a remnant, not a sample.
Wild ungulate biomass. Seidensticker measured 18,590 kg per km² of wild
ungulates in the riverine tall-grass habitat here — far higher than anywhere else recorded on
the Indian subcontinent, and the reason this valley carries the predator density it does.
Rhinoceros made up the bulk of it.
Short-grassland birds. The short grasslands hold obligate species that
exist almost nowhere else, including the Bengal florican — assessed by IUCN as Critically
Endangered — alongside two species of crane.
A source population, not an island. Chitwan is one of fifteen reserves in
the Terai Arc. Tigers leave it through corridors and buffer zones, and greater one-horned
rhinos have been carried out of it by hand since 1986 to found herds elsewhere. Its value is
partly what it sends to the rest of the landscape.
Area, buffer zone and dates: DNPWC, Government of Nepal. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 6083166. Note: that OSM ring measures ~1,208 km², about 27% more than the gazetted 952.6 km², so the outline here is indicative rather than cadastral — every area figure shown comes from DNPWC, not from the drawn shape. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring at roughly 1 km generalisation and are therefore scale-dependent (the true boundary is longer). UNESCO WHC #284. Chitwan's inscribed World Heritage property is 93,200 ha, a smaller 1984 boundary than today's gazetted park — the two are not the same figure.
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Rewilding · the source population
What Chitwan sent out
Most parks are measured by what they hold. Chitwan can also be measured by what it has given away. Since 1985 the park has been the source population for greater one-horned rhinoceros across the Terai — animals caught here, driven or flown west, and released to found herds in reserves where the species had been shot out. Two separate series, not one.
1985 · to India 4 all female, to Dudhwa
1986–2017 · within Nepal 100 45 male · 55 female
Bardia National Park 91 Karnali 13 · Babai 78
Shuklaphanta National Park 9 2000 and 2016
The register, 1986–2017
Year Month M F Total Released to
1986 February 3 1 4 Bardia — Karnali floodplain 1986 December 5 4 9 Bardia — Karnali floodplain 1991 January 6 14 20 Bardia — Babai floodplain 1991 February 2 3 5 Bardia — Babai floodplain 1999 January 4 0 4 Bardia — Babai floodplain 1999 March 5 5 10 Bardia — Babai floodplain 2000 November 3 3 6 Bardia — Babai floodplain 2000 November 1 3 4 Shuklaphanta 2001 March 3 2 5 Bardia — Babai floodplain 2002 March 5 5 10 Bardia — Babai floodplain 2003 April 3 7 10 Bardia — Babai floodplain 2016 March 3 2 5 Bardia — Babai floodplain 2016 April 1 4 5 Shuklaphanta 2017 April 1 2 3 Bardia — Babai floodplain
Total 45 55 100
Why moving rhinos is not the same as moving a species
The animal is a landscape engineer. Greater one-horned rhinoceros eat the fruit of Trewia nudiflora , a common riverine forest tree, and deposit the seed in communal latrines out in the grassland. Seedlings under the closed forest canopy recruit poorly; those germinating in latrines grow into robust plants. The rhinoceros is not merely present in the riverine forest — it is one of the things placing the trees.
And it decides what reaches the canopy. By browsing and trampling seedlings and saplings, rhinoceros suppress the vertical growth of the species they find palatable. The trees that make it into the canopy are disproportionately the ones they leave alone. Put rhinos back and you do not add a species to a list; you restore the process that sorts the forest.
The wider frame. Across the world, fewer than 21% of land areas still hold every large mammal they held in AD 1500. In Indomalaya — the realm the Terai belongs to — that figure is 1% . Work at ecoregion scale finds that around twenty species, returned by reintroduction or by reconnecting habitat, would complete the large-mammal assemblage across 54% of the terrestrial realm, some 11.1 million km². Most of the parks in question are not missing everything. They are missing one, two or three species — which is why a register like the one above is a restoration instrument and not just a logbook.
The other returns
Blackbuck — Nepal's only wild population survives at Khairapur in Bardia district, where 19 animals were recorded in 1975; 172 ha were declared the Krishnasar Conservation Area in 2009. Between 2012 and 2015, 42 blackbuck were moved to Shuklaphanta from three separate sources — 22 from Nepalgunj Mini Zoo, 14 from Khairapur, 6 from the Central Zoo at Lalitpur. That herd is now reported at 264.Gharial — the breeding centre at Kasara has released captive-reared gharial since 1981, into the Narayani, Rapti, Babai, Karnali, Kaligandaki and Koshi, and into the Chaudhar in Shuklaphanta. Survival after release is consistently described as low, and the published totals by river do not reconcile with the published headline totals; no single figure is shown here for that reason.Swamp deer — moved from Shuklaphanta, which holds Nepal's main herd, toward Bardia and Chitwan from 2016, to establish a second population rather than to found a new one.
What this record does not show
Not every animal moved has founded a herd. Of seven swamp deer held at the Padampur enclosure in Chitwan, two died shortly after arrival and others were lost in the floods of August 2017; wild water buffalo brought from Koshi Tappu in 2017 did not establish. These are the ordinary costs of a technique that was being invented as it was used, and the same decades produced a rhino population that went from roughly 95 animals to 694. Both belong in the record.
The map draws no boundary for the destinations. Bardia and Shuklaphanta — between them the destination of 96 of the 100 — have no openly licensed boundary available to us, so they are marked by name and position only. Nothing here is hand-drawn to fill that gap.
Two figures remain open. Chitwan National Park's own published count gives eleven rhinos to Shuklaphanta in three phases through 2018, against the nine in two consignments shown above; the register here ends in 2017 and is shown at that scope. The 1985 Dudhwa consignment rests on personal communication and a Dudhwa report not yet consulted here.
Translocation register, 1986–2017: compiled by Babu Ram Lamichhane, PhD, Wild Care Nepal, Kathmandu, and used with his agreement. 1985 Dudhwa consignment: B. R. Lamichhane, pers. comm., 19 September 2026, citing a report of Dudhwa National Park; four females, exchanged for sixteen elephants. Seed dispersal: Dinerstein, E. & Wemmer, C. M. 1988. Fruits rhinoceros eat: dispersal of Trewia nudiflora (Euphorbiaceae) in lowland Nepal. Ecology 69(6): 1768–1774. Forest structure: Dinerstein, E. 1992. Effects of Rhinoceros unicornis on riverine forest structure in lowland Nepal. Ecology 73(2): 701–704. Large-mammal faunas: Morrison, J. C., Sechrest, W., Dinerstein, E., Wilcove, D. S. & Lamoreux, J. F. 2007. Persistence of large mammal faunas as indicators of global human impacts. Journal of Mammalogy 88(6): 1363–1380. Assemblage restoration: Vynne, C., Gosling, J., Maney, C., Dinerstein, E. et al. 2022. An ecoregion-based approach to restoring the world's intact large mammal assemblages. Ecography 2022(4): e06098. Background: Dinerstein, E. 2003. The Return of the Unicorns . Columbia University Press. Blackbuck, gharial, swamp deer and wild buffalo figures are from Nepali press reporting and NTNC material and are shown as reported; they have not been reconciled against DNPWC primary records.
Overview
Forest Loss
People
The Terai Arc
Rewilding
Ecosystems
Reference maps
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Protected area — Chitwan National Park & park posts
Terai Arc
Protected area
Relief
Satellite
Forest loss
Altitude bands
Cartographic plates rendered from open data — Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM/Copernicus GLO-30) · Imagery: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023-2025) — Sentinel-2 L2A composite, 10 m, scenes 2023-02–2025-12 · Park boundaries, water & roads: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · Forest loss: Hansen/UMD GFC-2024 (Global Forest Watch) · International borders: OSM admin_level=2. Figures cited in-app (UNESCO WHC #284, IUCN Red List, DNPWC Nepal).
Imagery: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023-2025) · Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles · Boundaries & water: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · Protected-area boundaries: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · An independent visualization by Landseed PBC. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for DNPWC or NTNC.
