Data from: Not seeing the grass for the trees: timber plantations and agriculture shrink tropical montane grassland by two-thirds over four decades in the Palani Hills, a Western Ghats Sky Island

Tropical montane habitats, grasslands, in particular, merit urgent
conservation attention owing to the disproportionate levels of endemic
biodiversity they harbour, the ecosystem services they provide, and the
fact that they are among the most threatened habitats globally. The Shola
Sky Islands in the Western Ghats host a matrix of native forest-grassland
matrix that has been planted over the last century, with exotic timber
plantations. The popular discourse on the landscape change is that mainly
forests have been lost to the timber plantations and recent court
directives are to restore Shola forest trees. In this study, we examine
spatiotemporal patterns of landscape change over the last 40 years in the
Palani Hills, a significant part of the montane habitat in the Western
Ghats. Using satellite imagery and field surveys, we find that 66% of
native grasslands and 31% of native forests have been lost over the last
40 years. Grasslands have gone from being the dominant, most contiguous
land cover to one of the rarest and most fragmented. They have been
replaced by timber plantations and, to a lesser extent, expanding
agriculture. We find that the spatial pattern of grassland loss to
plantations differs from the loss to agriculture, likely driven by the
invasion of plantation species into grasslands. We identify remnant
grasslands that should be prioritised for conservation and make specific
recommendations for conservation and restoration of grasslands in light of
current management policy in the Palani Hills, which favours large-scale
removal of plantations and emphasises the restoration of native forests.