Conservation Strategies for Biodiversity: In-Situ and Ex-Situ Approaches

India is one of the world’s seventeen megadiverse nations, holding a remarkable share of the planet’s species within just over two percent of its land area. Yet this richness sits under constant pressure from expanding cities, intensive farming, and a changing climate. Protecting it is not only about saving tigers or rare orchids. It is about securing the genetic raw material that feeds us, the wild plants that future medicines may come from, and the ecological systems that keep soil fertile and rivers flowing. Conservation scientists broadly group their tools into two complementary approaches: protecting life where it naturally occurs, and safeguarding it in carefully managed facilities. Understanding how these two strategies work, and why both are needed, is central to making sense of how biodiversity is actually saved.

Why conserving biodiversity matters 🔗

Biodiversity is not a luxury concern reserved for protected forests. It underpins food security, public health, and economic stability. The clearest example is in agriculture. Over the past century, breeders relied heavily on the genetic diversity stored in wild relatives and traditional crop varieties to develop the high-yielding seeds that powered the Green Revolution. Each disease-resistant or drought-tolerant trait bred into a modern crop originally came from somewhere in nature’s gene pool.

The problem is that this pool is shrinking. As farmers shift to a handful of commercial varieties, older local types disappear, a process called genetic erosion. When diversity narrows, the entire food system becomes more fragile. A single new pest or a shift in rainfall patterns can threaten crops that lack the genetic backup to adapt. This is why conservation strategy treats genetic diversity as a form of insurance for food and nutritional security, not merely a scientific curiosity.

The three levels of diversity 🔗

Biodiversity is measured at three connected levels, and conservation works across all of them.

Genetic diversity refers to variation within a single species, such as the thousands of rice varieties grown across Indian states. Species diversity covers the variety of different organisms in a region. Ecosystem diversity describes the range of habitats, from mangroves to alpine meadows, each supporting its own web of life. Losing diversity at any level weakens the others, which is why effective conservation cannot focus on charismatic animals alone while ignoring the plants, microbes, and habitats around them.

In-situ conservation: protecting life in its natural home 🔗

In-situ conservation means protecting species within their natural habitats. The logic is simple and powerful. When a species stays in its original environment, it continues the ongoing processes of evolution and adaptation, responding to natural pressures rather than living in artificial isolation. The whole ecosystem, including the soil organisms, pollinators, and predators a species depends on, is preserved together.

This approach is delivered mainly through a network of legally protected areas. National parks offer the strictest protection, where the primary aim is to conserve the natural environment with minimal human interference. Wildlife sanctuaries allow somewhat more flexibility, permitting certain regulated human activities. India maintains a large system of such areas; Kaziranga National Park, for instance, has been central to recovering the one-horned rhinoceros, while parks like Ranthambore anchor tiger conservation.

Biosphere reserves and the buffer model 🔗

Biosphere reserves represent a more sophisticated version of in-situ conservation. Recognised under UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme launched in 1971, they are designed to balance conservation with sustainable human use. Each reserve has a strictly protected core area, a surrounding buffer zone where limited research and sustainable activity is allowed, and a transition zone where communities live and work.

India’s first biosphere reserve, the Nilgiri reserve in the Western Ghats, was set up in 1986. Several Indian reserves, including the Gulf of Mannar, Sundarbans, and Simlipal, are part of UNESCO’s global network. This model matters because it recognises a hard truth: in a densely populated country, conservation that excludes people entirely is rarely durable. Letting local communities benefit from a protected landscape gives them a stake in keeping it healthy.

Community-led and traditional protection 🔗

Not all in-situ conservation happens through formal parks. India has a deep tradition of sacred groves, patches of forest protected by local communities for cultural and religious reasons, with over a lakh of them scattered across the country. The Chipko movement of the 1970s in the Garhwal Himalayas, where villagers embraced trees to stop them being felled, showed how community resistance could protect forests directly. These grassroots forms of protection are increasingly recognised as legitimate and effective parts of the conservation toolkit.

Ex-situ conservation: safeguarding life off-site 🔗

Ex-situ conservation means protecting components of biodiversity outside their natural habitats, in controlled settings. This becomes essential when a species cannot survive in the wild, when its habitat is degraded beyond immediate repair, or when scientists need a secure backup against catastrophic loss. As conservation biologists put it, ex-situ methods serve as reservoirs of genetic diversity and sources for species reintroduction.

Familiar examples include zoos and botanical gardens, where animals and plants are bred and studied in protected environments. The Indian Botanical Garden in Kolkata, home to the famous Great Banyan Tree, is one of the oldest such institutions. But the most strategically important ex-situ work today happens in gene banks and laboratories.

Gene banks and seed storage 🔗

A gene bank is a repository that stores genetic material such as seeds, pollen, and tissue, designed to conserve crop diversity and protect varieties from extinction. India’s primary facility is the National Gene Bank at the ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources in New Delhi, established in 1996. It conserves plant genetic resources for future generations in the form of seeds, genomic resources, and pollen, working through a network of regional stations across the country.

The work here directly serves food security. By preserving heritage and climate-resilient crop varieties, the gene bank acts as a fail-safe vault, distributing material to breeders and researchers who develop new varieties. India has been setting up a second National Gene Bank to strengthen this safety net, recognising how critical stored genetic material is for resilience against climate change.

Cryopreservation and tissue culture 🔗

Modern biotechnology has expanded what ex-situ conservation can achieve. Tissue culture grows whole plants from tiny pieces of tissue under sterile conditions, allowing rare varieties to be multiplied without needing seeds. Cryopreservation goes further, storing genetic material at temperatures below minus 150 degrees Celsius. At such extreme cold, biological activity essentially stops, letting material stay viable for very long periods. This is especially useful for species whose seeds cannot survive ordinary storage. The Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad maintains a DNA bank of Indian species using such techniques.

Internationally, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, often called the “doomsday vault,” is the largest backup facility of its kind, holding duplicate samples of seeds from gene banks worldwide. Such projects show that genetic security is now treated as a global responsibility.

India’s legal and policy framework 🔗

India’s conservation effort is anchored in law. The country signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which came into force in December 1993, committing it to conserve biodiversity, use it sustainably, and share its benefits fairly. To meet these obligations, Parliament passed the Biological Diversity Act in 2002, which provides the framework for conservation and for sharing benefits from biological resources with local communities.

One important feature of this law is its attention to agricultural diversity. It requires every local body to set up a Biodiversity Management Committee to promote the conservation of habitats, landraces, folk varieties, cultivars, and domesticated breeds. Here, a landrace means a primitive cultivated variety grown by ancient farmers and their successors, while a folk variety is one developed and exchanged informally among farmers. These committees also prepare People’s Biodiversity Registers, documenting local resources and the traditional knowledge tied to them.

Protecting wild relatives and crops 🔗

India has taken specific steps to protect the wild relatives of crops, which carry valuable genes for future breeding. The country established its first gene sanctuary in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya to protect wild relatives of citrus, with similar efforts directed at species such as banana, rice, sugarcane, and mango. Protecting these wild populations in place is a hybrid of in-situ thinking applied directly to agricultural security.

Why both approaches are needed together 🔗

In-situ and ex-situ conservation are not competing choices. They are complementary halves of a single strategy. In-situ conservation provides the natural evolutionary context that lets species adapt and stay resilient. Ex-situ conservation offers a backup against catastrophic loss and a base for research and reintroduction. The standard view among conservationists is that ex-situ methods are a last resort or a safety net, not a replacement for protecting habitats.

Climate change makes this integration more urgent. As habitats shift and species face new stresses, conservation programmes increasingly need to move genetic material between wild and managed settings. A species might be bred in a controlled facility and then reintroduced once its habitat is restored. Indian policy reflects this thinking; the Biological Diversity Act explicitly calls for the state to promote both in-situ and ex-situ conservation, including of landraces and folk varieties, within national strategies.

Sustainable agriculture closes the loop. Reviving traditional farming practices that work with natural processes, rather than against them, helps conserve agrobiodiversity on working farmland while supporting farmer livelihoods. Conservation, in this fuller sense, is woven into how food is grown, not confined to fenced-off reserves.

What do you think? If a crop variety survives only inside a gene bank but has vanished from every farmer’s field, has it really been conserved in any meaningful way? And as cities and farmland keep expanding, how should the balance be struck between protecting habitats in place and relying on controlled facilities as a backup?

References

1. https://cdn.cseindia.org/aad2022/AAD-session9-VBMathur.pdf
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_conservation_in_India
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371154727_In-situ_and_Ex-situ_Strategy_forBiodiversity_Conservation
4. https://www.pmfias.com/biodiversity-conservation/
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382074396_Ex-situ_and_in-situ_conservation_of_wild_life
6. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-news-analysis/national-gene-bank
7. https://www.insightsonindia.com/2025/03/29/national-gene-bank/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Diversity_Act,_2002
9. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/21545/1/the_biological_diversity_act,_2002.pdf