An ornamental shrub introduced by the British two centuries ago has quietly colonised more than 40 percent of India’s tiger habitat — reshaping predator behaviour, collapsing prey bases, and pushing tigers towards livestock and people. The story of how one invasive plant became one of the country’s most serious conservation crises.
On the edges of India’s forests, a new kind of tiger story is quietly unfolding. These tigers do not range open grasslands or stalk chital in dappled riverine light. They move, instead, through impenetrable thickets of an exotic shrub whose bright yellow and pink flowers offer not beauty but concealment. Their prey is not sambar or wild boar but cattle — old, unproductive, or free-ranging animals grazing along the forest fringe. And they are found not inside protected reserves but just beyond their boundaries, in the contested matrix of farmland, revenue forest, and village commons that surrounds India’s most celebrated wildlife landscapes.
Down To Earth, in a landmark investigation published in June 2026, called them ‘lantana tigers’ — a name that captures both an ecological adaptation and a governance failure. The plant responsible is Lantana camara, a woody shrub native to Central and South America that was introduced to the Indian subcontinent by the British in the early 19th century as a garden ornamental and hedge plant. It has since become one of the country’s most ecologically destructive invasive species, and its relationship with India’s tiger population is now the subject of urgent scientific and policy attention.
Lantana has created predator-friendly habitat structures in prey-poor landscapes. For the tiger, it offers near-perfect cover — with low visibility and an abundance of cattle just beyond the forest edge.
The Scale of the Invasion
The numbers are staggering, and they deserve to be stated plainly before anything else. A comprehensive study published in Global Ecology and Conservation found that Lantana camara now occupies approximately 154,000 square kilometres of India’s forested landscapes — more than 40 percent of the country’s tiger range by area. A separate national-level assessment under the CAMPA framework estimated that lantana has invaded roughly 86,806 square kilometres of Indian forests, constituting approximately 38.8 percent of national forest area. The two figures reflect different methodologies and boundary definitions, but they converge on the same alarming conclusion: lantana is not a localised nuisance. It is a landscape-level ecological emergency.
The plant’s reach across tiger reserves is particularly severe. At Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu, nearly 44 percent of the entire reserve area has been affected. Bandipur Tiger Reserve in Karnataka — one of India’s finest — is, in significant sections, completely covered with lantana bushes, a situation that has alarmed both ecologists and field managers for over a decade. Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Pench, Tadoba, Corbett, and Rajaji all carry substantial lantana burdens across their deciduous forest zones. The NTCA’s own Status of Tigers 2022 technical volume confirms that lantana occurred in priority management areas across virtually all protected areas with dry and moist deciduous forests. That is to say: the problem spans the majority of India’s tiger landscape.
LANTANA IN NUMBERS
▸ 154,000 sq. km — estimated extent of lantana in India’s tiger range (Global Ecology and Conservation)
▸ 40% — proportion of India’s tiger habitat area affected (multiple studies)
▸ 44% — area of Mudumalai Tiger Reserve affected by lantana
▸ 300,000 sq. km — additional forest area at risk of future invasion
▸ ₹14.04 crore — NTCA grant for invasive species removal in Telangana reserves (2025–26)
▸ 10 to 42 — tiger count in Amrabad Tiger Reserve over nine years of active habitat restoration
What Lantana Does to a Forest
To understand why this matters for tigers, one must understand what lantana does to a forest from the ground up. The shrub grows into dense, multi-stemmed thickets that can reach three to four metres in height, forming near-impenetrable walls of woody vegetation. These thickets block sunlight from reaching the forest floor, suppressing the native grasses, forbs, and shrubs that form the primary diet of wild ungulates such as chital (spotted deer), sambar, nilgai, and gaur. Where lantana dominates, the undergrowth effectively disappears. What remains looks green — from a satellite or a moving vehicle, lantana-choked forest appears to be forest. But it is what conservationists have begun calling a ‘green desert’: visually lush, ecologically empty.
Lantana’s chemistry compounds its structural impact. The plant’s leaves contain compounds that are toxic to most herbivores; extended consumption can cause allergic reactions on the muzzles of cattle and deer, and in severe cases, ingestion leads to diarrhoea, liver failure, and death. Most wild ungulates learn to avoid lantana foliage — which means they avoid lantana-dominated areas. The result is a profound reorganisation of animal space use: herbivores concentrate in the remaining lantana-free pockets, while vast sections of forest become prey-depleted zones in which tigers cannot sustain themselves on wild animals alone.
Lantana also disrupts fire regimes. In Indian dry deciduous forests, periodic low-intensity fires have historically kept undergrowth open and maintained the grassland patches that support high herbivore density. Lantana is highly flammable but also highly fire-tolerant — it burns readily but resprouts vigorously from rootstock within weeks of a fire, often recovering faster than native grasses and thereby preventing the post-fire grassland regeneration that the system depends upon. This fire-invasion feedback loop can lock a landscape into a lantana-dominated state that persists for decades without active intervention.
The Making of a Lantana Tiger
It is against this ecological backdrop that the behavioural change documented by CSE’s State of India’s Environment 2026 report must be understood. The report, released in February 2026, concluded that India’s tigers are changing their behaviour in measurable, ecologically significant ways — and that lantana is a central driver. Ninad Mungi, Assistant Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and one of the leading researchers on the subject, articulated the mechanism precisely at the Anil Agarwal Dialogue 2026: ‘For the tiger, lantana-rich areas offer near-perfect cover, with low visibility and limited escape routes for their prey — besides an abundance of cattle. What lantana has done is to create predator-friendly habitat structures in prey-poor landscapes.’
The logic is straightforward, even if its consequences are complex. A tiger is an opportunistic predator that selects prey based on energetic return and hunting success probability. Dense lantana provides outstanding ambush cover — better, in some respects, than open forest — but the prey that remains in lantana-heavy landscapes is overwhelmingly livestock. In places like Bandhavgarh and Tadoba, tigers are increasingly using lantana-dominated patches beyond reserve boundaries as daytime refuges and as hunting grounds for cattle. Cattle, particularly older or unproductive animals allowed to graze in forest-fringe areas, are calorie-dense prey that require relatively less hunting effort than alert wild ungulates in open terrain.
The SOE 2026 report documented that at least 43 people were killed near tiger reserves across India in the first six months of 2025 alone. In four of these attacks, tigers partly consumed their victims — a pattern more associated with habituated or prey-stressed animals than with healthy tigers in prey-rich habitats. Wildlife biologists are cautious about attributing individual attacks to single causes, but the broader epidemiological pattern — tigers outside reserves, cattle as primary prey, human encounters in lantana-dense forest-fringe zones — recurs across central and southern India in ways that cannot be dismissed as coincidence.
Where lantana dominates, the undergrowth disappears. What remains looks green — from a satellite, lantana-choked forest appears to be forest. But it is a ‘green desert’: visually lush, ecologically empty.
Amrabad: What Removal Can Achieve
The case of Amrabad Tiger Reserve in Telangana’s Nallamala Hills offers the most compelling available evidence that active lantana management can produce measurable conservation gains — and offers a template, however preliminary, for what sustained investment in ecological restoration might achieve elsewhere.
Carved out of the larger Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam landscape after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014, Amrabad covers approximately 2,600 square kilometres of Eastern Ghats dry deciduous forest across Nagarkurnool and Nalgonda districts. In its early years, the reserve confronted a trifecta of threats: lantana, Eupatorium, and Parthenium dominated its understorey, suppressing grass cover and holding prey density at critically low levels. The official reserve website listed weed management as a core conservation priority from the outset, noting that clearing weeds was essential ‘to restore the grassland for improvement of prey density.’
What followed was a sustained multi-year programme of mechanical lantana removal — primarily using the cut-root-stock (CRS) method, which severs the plant below the root-shoot transition point to prevent resprouting — combined with active grassland restoration using native grass species and the creation of waterholes in cleared areas. Crucially, this was not a one-time clearance exercise but an ongoing management programme sustained with central and state funding, including a significant NTCA grant of ₹14.04 crore for invasive species removal in Telangana’s tiger reserves in 2025–26.
The results speak with a clarity that is rare in conservation. In 2016, Amrabad held an estimated 10 tigers. Phase IV monitoring for 2024–25, conducted with 1,594 camera traps across 797 grid locations, recorded 36 individual tigers — 34 adults and two sub-adults — with a notable increase in breeding females. The January 2026 AITE 2026 field survey, conducted between 19 and 25 January, identified 42 individual tigers. A reserve that held 10 tigers nine years ago now holds 42. Forest officials attribute this fourfold increase substantially to grassland restoration through weed removal, alongside anti-poaching efforts and improved monitoring. While the attribution is necessarily complex — better monitoring detects more tigers, and the landscape’s natural carrying capacity may have additional room — the trajectory is unambiguous.
Corbett, Kanha, and the Limits of Episodic Clearance
Amrabad’s gains did not come easily, and they did not come through a single clearance campaign. This is a crucial lesson that practitioners in other reserves have learned through repeated failure. Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand was one of the first reserves to develop a systematic approach to lantana eradication, pioneering the cut-root-stock method in demonstration plots of two to five hectares in collaboration with the Wildlife Institute of India. Restored sites at Corbett showed significant recovery of species richness and herbivore activity within two to three years of clearance and subsequent native grass establishment — providing the ecological proof of concept that removal works.
However, the Corbett experience also illustrated the central challenge: lantana resprouts and reinvades with remarkable vigour if follow-up management is not maintained. Birds — particularly frugivores and generalists — disperse lantana seeds widely through their droppings, meaning that cleared patches adjacent to infested forest face continuous re-invasion pressure from the forest canopy above. Effective eradication requires not just cutting established plants but ongoing removal of seedlings germinating beneath bird-perching trees and in drainage channels that carry seeds from upstream infested areas. Without this follow-up, lantana regains significant cover within three to five years.
At Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) has been conducting lantana removal in buffer zone areas since 2015. A study in 2024 documented that wildlife camera-trap activity increased measurably in treated areas compared to untreated controls, and that farmers in buffer villages reported reduced crop raiding — because, as ecologists understand, improved prey density inside the forest reduces the pressure on tigers to exit the reserve. This livestock-conflict feedback is one of the most compelling arguments for lantana management as a conflict-reduction strategy, not merely a habitat-quality measure.
The Innovation Economy of Removal: Briquettes and Furniture
One of the most creative responses to the lantana challenge has emerged not from conservation biology but from social enterprise. The sheer volume of biomass generated by large-scale lantana removal has stimulated a cottage industry of value-addition projects that simultaneously provide livelihoods to forest-fringe communities and create economic incentives for sustained removal. In Masinagudi, at the boundary of Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, a 2025 pilot project converts cleared lantana stems into binder-free fuel briquettes, providing clean cooking energy and supplementary income to local tribal communities. At Bandipur, lantana-based furniture and handicraft projects have created conservation-linked employment for people who might otherwise be direct stakeholders in continued forest encroachment.
The Telangana state government highlighted a similar initiative in 2025, framing lantana removal as both an ecological necessity and a livelihood opportunity. These models are still at pilot scale and have not been systematically evaluated for carbon-accounting or long-term replication potential. But they represent a genuinely promising convergence: the removal generates biomass, the biomass generates income, the income creates community stake in the continuation of removal, and the cleared land generates prey and, ultimately, tigers. If this cycle can be scaled and sustained, it offers a model in which communities living alongside reserves benefit economically from the ecological health of those reserves.
What This Means for India’s Conservation Strategy
The broader significance of the lantana problem for India’s tiger conservation narrative cannot be overstated. The country’s celebrated census numbers — 3,682 tigers in 2022, with a sixth census underway — are counted against a background in which more than 40 percent of tiger habitat is ecologically compromised by this single invasive species. The tigers that are being counted are, in many landscapes, adapting to a degraded environment: using lantana cover, eating cattle, living on forest edges, and coming into increasing contact with humans. The headline number measures survival. It does not measure the quality of the habitat in which that survival is occurring.
India’s NTCA recognises this. The 2022 Status of Tigers technical volume explicitly lists lantana management as a priority intervention in virtually all deciduous tiger reserves. The sixth census (AITE 2026) includes habitat quality parameters — including invasive species burden — among its assessment variables for the first time at this scale. These are welcome developments. But the gap between policy recognition and on-ground resourcing remains large. Lantana management is labour-intensive, multi-year work that requires sustained funding rather than episodic grants. The ₹14.04 crore allocated to Telangana in 2025–26 produced results in Amrabad. The question is whether the same intensity of investment can be replicated across 58 reserves — including the dozens in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Uttarakhand where lantana is advancing with little organised resistance.
The lantana tiger is an adaptation story: a predator responding with functional intelligence to an ecologically impoverished landscape. It is also, unmistakably, a warning. When a tiger starts hunting cattle instead of chital, the ecological system that connects predator and prey through millions of years of co-evolution has been disrupted. The question for India’s conservation governance is whether the system can be repaired — patch by patient patch, grassland by restored grassland — before the adaptation becomes permanent.
–Kalpana Kakarla
