Lansdowne Forest Division is the living corridor binding Rajaji and Corbett National Parks — a continuous reach of sal, pine and deodar that lets elephants and tigers move as they have for centuries.
Set in the Pauri Garhwal foothills of Uttarakhand, the Lansdowne Forest Division stretches across five forest ranges — Laldhang, Kotdwar, Kothadi, Lansdowne and Duggadda. Together they hold one of the most important stretches of unbroken habitat in the western Terai-Arc.
Its value is connective. The division sits squarely between Rajaji and Corbett National Parks, and the animals that need both depend on the ground in between. Protecting Lansdowne means keeping that passage open.
From riverine grassland along the Kho and its tributaries to ridgeline conifer, the division spans a steep ecological gradient — and the wildlife shifts with it at every elevation.
Rajaji lies to the west, Corbett to the east. Lansdowne is the ground that joins them — the route by which elephant herds and tigers disperse, find mates, and survive as one connected population rather than two isolated ones.
Why connectivity matters: an elephant herd needs hundreds of square kilometres; a tiger needs room to find unrelated mates. When a corridor is severed, populations shrink into islands and slide toward local extinction. Keeping Lansdowne intact keeps Rajaji and Corbett behaving as one ecosystem.
Each range carries its own terrain, its own pressures and its own stretch of the corridor to protect.
Climb from the riverbeds to the ridges and the canopy changes with you — sal giving way to pine, pine to deodar.
Cool, high slopes crowned by deodar cedar — shaded, slow-growing, and home to montane birds.
Open, resinous pine ridges that catch the dry-season sun and shed needles across the understorey.
The blending zone where moist valley species meet the lower pine — dense, varied, and rich in birdlife.
Towering sal over riverine grassland — the elephant and tiger ground, and the river reaches the mahseer breed in.
A few of the species that define this landscape — from the rivers to the high canopy.
Photographs from the division's forests and rivers — the wildlife the corridor exists to protect.
The division's work is the quiet kind — patrolling corridors, easing human–wildlife conflict, restoring degraded forest, and keeping the passage between the parks open for the animals that need it.
Visitors are part of that work. Move gently, leave nothing, and let the forest stay the way the wildlife needs it.