assembling real terrain

चितवन राष्ट्रिय निकुञ्ज · Nepal

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Forest loss2001

2001Hansen / UMD2024

Viewpoint 27.5°N · 84.35°E Inner Terai · Nepal

Map key

Indicative range from habitat rules — not sightings

Chitwan National Park

Adjacent reserves

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

One-horned rhino

Bengal tiger

Gharial

Mugger crocodile

Asian elephant

Gaur

Sloth bear

Bengal florican

Ganges river dolphin

Leopard

Grassland & wetland birds

Highways & main roads

Park post / HQ

Human settlement · 2020

People per 100 m cell

scatteredtown

Chitwan National Parkno 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 · from ~110 m in the park

Churia crest, dry ridge650–850

Churia slope450–650

Sal forest, valley260–450

Alluvial grassland180–260

Floodplain & river100–180

Bands are altitude, not vegetation.

Protection status · Terai Arc

Context reserveOpenStreetMap

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

Active fire—24h

Deforestation—30d

NASA FIRMS · Integrated Deforestation Alerts: UMD/GLAD and WUR, via Global Nature Watch (formerly Global Forest Watch), CC BY 4.0 · powered by Resource Watch

10 km

Chitwan

The boundary · the record

Chitwan National Park

A broad basin of 952.6 km² held between two hill ranges and three rivers. It is a far more compact shape than a long ribbon park, but almost every kilometre of that edge is farmland, and much of it is river.

Area: 952.6 km² gazetted
Buffer zone: 729.4 km² 1996
Boundary: 309 km as digitised
Compactness: 0.16 Polsby–Popper
Established: 1973
Elevation: from ~110 m our DEM

UNESCO World Heritage — inscribed 1984 (criteria vii, ix, x)
Nepal's first national park — gazetted 1973; the buffer zone followed in 1996

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 forest and tall grass near Sauraha in 1974: “surpassing that reported for other areas on the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka or, indeed, most other areas of the world.” Greater one-horned rhinoceros made up 15,792 kg per km² of it. Across the whole park the figure was 1,756 kg per km².

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.

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. 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. The translocation figures are held, not shown, until their compiler has agreed to their publication.

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 translocation register 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.

The map draws no boundary for the destinations. Bardia and Shuklaphanta are marked by name and position only. Nothing here is hand-drawn to fill that gap.

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.

Imagery: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023-2025) · Elevation: United States 3DEP (formerly NED) and global GMTED2010 and SRTM terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. · 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.