Why it in news?

• Scientists have obtained the first evidence of the elusive snow leopard in Arunachal Pradesh.
• Camera traps have captured images of the big cat at Thembang village’s Community Conserved Area, a community-owned reserve, in West Kameng district.

Community reserves

• In 2004, WWF-India introduced the concept of CCAs in the State to empower local communities to become active decision-makers and implement conservation initiatives.
• Local communities in these CCAs form committees to undertake wildlife monitoring, patrolling and community-based tourism activities.

Finding of study

• The presence of the species outside a protected areas highlights the importance of community support for conservation as well as landscape-scale planning, says World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF-India), which conducted the camera trap study.
• With only a small fraction of snow leopard habitats falling in the two protected areas (the Dibang Biosphere Reserve and Namdapha National Park) in the State, scientists tapped into the knowledge of locals — including herders and former hunters — to understand the current distribution of snow leopards and other mammals.
• Over 80 per cent of the respondents confirmed the presence of snow leopards in their area. The research team deployed camera traps in select areas to document the species and obtained the photograph of a snow leopard in the Community Conserved Area (CCA).
• Arunachal Pradesh is one of the 22 priority landscapes of the Global Snow Leopard Ecosystem Protection Program and while locals and researchers knew that there were snow leopards in the area, scientists had not been able to get photographs thus far. 

Community and conservation reserves

• Community reserves : On land of private or community ownership, if a group of people are doing conservation work and Government gives it a legal recognition then it is called Community reserves.
• Whereas Conservation reserves are government owned land.
• In both the cases conservation efforts are by local community only. Conservation reserves are usually found around the Protected Area Networks like National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries.
• Both of them are covered under Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.