Background: why Kaziranga, now open for the season, is on the World Heritage List

Background

Kaziranga, which has just opened to visitors for the new season, is not only a national park and tiger reserve but also a World Heritage property. It is listed as Kaziranga National Park in Assam State, India, with an area of 42,996 hectares. The listing rests on criteria nine and ten, the first for the ecological processes driven by the river and the second for the threatened species the park supports. UNESCO records it as holding the world's largest population of the one-horned rhinoceros, put at over two thousand animals. The same grasslands and wetlands also carry tigers, Asian elephants, wild water buffalo and the Ganges River dolphin. The river that shapes all of this is the Brahmaputra, whose annual flooding both renews the grassland and forces the park to shut for the monsoon. So the flood that closes the park each year is the very process the World Heritage listing recognises.