Description

Stretching like a mountainous spine down the western edge of India, the Western Ghats are a unique mountain range that harbours an incredible diversity of flora and fauna . Although most of the Western Ghats appear more like rolling hills than craggy snow-covered peaks , parts of it do reach over 2,000 metres and it contains the highest mountain in India, the Anaimudi, at 2,695 metres ^.
The peaks of the Western Ghats intercept the south-western monsoon winds, which bring heavy rain between June and September. An astonishing 2 to 8 metres of rain drench the Western Ghats each year, most of it falling in the short monsoon period. These rains feed dozens of rivers that originate in the mountains, and flow down into India, providing drinking water, irrigation, and power for approximately 245 million people ^.
The rainfall patterns in the Western Ghats not only sustain the livelihoods of millions, but, coupled with the region’s complex geography and temperature gradient (from over 30 degrees Celsius at sea level to 0 degrees Celsius at the highest parts ^, produces a great variety of vegetation types.
Scrub forests on the low-lying, drier, eastern slopes give way to deciduousand tropical rainforests that occur up to about 1,500 metres. Above this elevation, a mosaic of rolling grasslands and montane cloud forests (locally called ‘shola’) blanket the Ghats. The Western Ghats also contain savannas; peat bogs, where grasses, sedges and mosses flourish in areas of high rainfall over 2,000 metres; and Myristica swamps, a freshwater wetland unique to the Western Ghats found between sea level and 600 metres .
This incredible variety in vegetation types gives rise to an astonishing diversity of fauna. Although the Western Ghats cover less than 6 percent of the land area of India, it contains more than 30 percent of the country’s mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species , and many animals are still being discovered.

Range

The Western Ghats run 1,600 kilometres from just north of Mumbai, south through the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala before petering out in Tamil Nadu, close to the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, Most of the Western Ghats run parallel to the coast, 50 to 80 kilometres inland from the Arabian Sea . This mountainous range covers an area of about 160,000 square kilometres, and is broken only by the Palghat Gap, a 302 kilometre wide gap in the Western Ghats.