HomeSources & Data

The primary documentary record for this landscape reaches back to 1790 and most of it is freely available and entirely uncited online. This is the working bibliography — filter it, follow it, correct it — plus the atlas's own live coverage dashboard.

1790oldest dated event — the Battle of Sathyamangalam
1807oldest survey — Buchanan's journey
1887oldest statistics — Nicholson's Manual
1870oldest maps — Survey of India sheets

01

Ten Coverage Domains, Mapped

This atlas tracks coverage across ten domains of the underlying database — from confirmed species occurrences down to legal instruments and community material. The dashboard below (section 03) computes live percentages for each; here's what each domain actually contains.

Occurrence Records

74,180 georeferenced GBIF records, one citable download, sensitive taxa coarsened to a 0.05° grid.

Taxa

1,893 taxa recorded — 94.7% of the 2,000-taxon target. See the full species atlas.

Documents

973 tier A+B assessed-relevant papers, theses and reports of a 9,029-document raw harvest — see the full A–D tier breakdown below.

Places

89 gazetteer entries against a 1,200-place target — 7.4% complete. See the gazetteer & map.

Historical Passages

Buchanan 1807, Nicholson 1887, gazetteer entries — transcription of primary passages in progress.

Legal Instruments

Forest Act 1882/1927, WPA 1972, FRA 2006, GOMS 122/2008, court orders — see Governance.

Environmental Layers

Sentinel-2 NDVI/fire, Survey of India historical sheets, rainfall series — planned, not yet live.

News

Current journalism on invasive clearance, human-elephant conflict and the reserve's road disputes.

Media

8 CC-licensed photographs re-hosted under site/media/ — full ledger in the media credits.

Community

Soliga, Irula, Kurumba, Malasar documentation — consent-gated, see People.


02

The Bibliography

0 sources shown here as a curated selection. The full backend document set holds 973 assessed-relevant papers, theses and reports (tier A+B, the "safe to cite" set — see the full tier breakdown below) against a target of 1,500 — 64.9% complete. A larger raw harvest of 9,029 documents exists in total; most of the remainder sits in tiers C and D or is entirely untriaged, not cited on this site. The largest untapped seams are Shodhganga (Indian PhD theses), the Journal of Threatened Taxa, SACON technical reports, the Annual Administration Reports of the Madras Forest Department, and the historic working plans for Sathyamangalam Forest Division — some of which are held at the Gass Forest Museum, Coimbatore, established 1902.


03

The Unreviewed Harvest

These are not sources. They are candidates. 0 documents the harvester has pulled in that nobody has assessed for whether they are actually about this landscape. They carry no relevance tier, so they are excluded from the Bibliography above and from every citation on this site — deliberately, and until a person triages them.

The failure mode is visible in the list itself: the harvester matches on place names, so a paper on customer satisfaction at a trading firm in Gobichettipalayam, or the financial performance of a spinning mill named after Bannari Amman, is pulled in alongside genuine ecology. Treat a title here as "worth a look", nothing more.
YearTitleAuthorsLink

Showing 0 of 0 unreviewed documents. Source: documents_unreviewed.json — kept separate from documents.json (the 973 assessed tier A/B sources) so an untriaged row can never be mistaken for a citable one.


04

Tiers A–D — the Full Assessed Harvest

Every document with any tier, browsable. The bibliography above shows a 44-entry curated selection. This is the full 7,605-document set behind it, across all four tiers a document can carry: A (the reserve and places inside it), B (adjoining protected areas and the district), C (regional context, species and communities), and D, a legacy tier that predates this repository's own tiering script — its provenance isn't recorded here, and it is shown for transparency, not endorsed as reviewed.

Only A and B are treated as citable anywhere on this site — that's an explicit editorial ruling (see scripts/tier_documents.py), not an oversight. Browsing C or D below does not promote them into the bibliography. Editorial question for Vishnu: an earlier instruction for this run asked for "A/B/C as citable sources" together — that reads as loosening the existing A/B-only ruling made the same day. This page keeps the standing ruling (A/B only) and lists C separately, pending your call on whether C should be promoted.
YearTitleAuthorsTier

Showing 0 of 0 documents. Sources: documents.json (A/B) and documents_other_tiers.json (C/D).

05

Archives Worth Visiting in Person

Gass Forest Museum, Coimbatore

Established 1902. Madras Forest Department historical records, specimens and library. Two hours from Erode — the most reachable primary archive for this forest.

Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai

Government Orders, district records, forest administration reports. The 2008 sanctuary notification (GOMS No. 122) lives here; the 2013 tiger reserve notification has since been obtained directly from NTCA's own published records — though its own G.O. number is itself disputed, "No. 4" per that scan vs. "No. 45" per the Forest Department's current portal.

Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai

Tamil-language print archive — local histories, temple literature, periodicals. The Tamil record of this landscape is almost entirely absent from the English internet.

06

Open Data — Meant to be Reused

Content CC BY-SA 4.0; datasets CC BY 4.0. Cite it, fork it, correct it.

🛰

Sentinel-2 / Earth Engine

NDVI time series, fire scars, Senna flowering phenology and post-clearance regrowth verification. The flagship layer.

🗺

Historical map overlay

Survey of India sheets 1870–1966 (NLS, georeferenced) against current land cover. A 150-year change map nobody has built.

🔬

GBIF

All occurrence records inside the reserve polygon, refreshed nightly via REST API with WKT geometry filtering.

🐦

eBird & iNaturalist

Live species lists, recent sightings, and CC-licensed photographs for species entries.

🔥

FSI fire alerts

Near-real-time forest fire alerts mapped to range and beat.

📚

The STR bibliography

Every paper, thesis, report and grey document, with DOI and open-access link where legal. No Indian tiger reserve has one.

🏘

Census of India 2011

Village-level demographics for every settlement in the gazetteer, joined to the place entries.

🌧

IMD / CHIRPS / ERA5

Rainfall and temperature series to extend the management plan's 824 mm baseline forward and backward.

🔗

Wikidata Q2226064

Structured identifiers linking every entity here to the wider open-knowledge graph.


07

Coverage, by Domain — Live From the Database

DomainHaveTargetCompleteNote
Loading live coverage from exports/coverage.json…

Overall coverage: , weighted across domains. This figure is computed live from exports/coverage.json, which is regenerated straight from data/atlas.db by scripts/export_from_db.py — nobody hand-edits this number. Automated harvest tops out around 62–68% by design; the rest needs management-plan extraction, physical archives, a Forest Department relationship and original photography.

08

Figures Still in Dispute

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Conflicting values are preserved and rendered side by side, straight from exports/claims.json. This atlas does not silently pick a winner. None should be published as a single figure until someone with authority rules on which source the atlas follows — no amount of further data collection resolves this.

What this atlas does not yet have — stated plainly

Complete reptile, amphibian, fish, invertebrate and flora checklists (the appendices exist; transcription is in progress). Compartment-level boundaries. Published fire history. Current staff and budget figures. Visitor statistics. Verified current fee schedules. Full Tamil translation. Oral history recordings. Original photography of the landscape, its species and its places. Historical passages, legal instruments, environmental layers, news records and media are all at zero — see the coverage table above. Honest gaps beat confident guesses — if you can close one, get in touch.

How to cite

The Sathyamangalam Record (2026). Sathyamangalam: land, life, people and history. Version 3.0. Retrieved [date] from sathyamangalam.org

Contribute a correction

Every factual claim carries a source. If one is wrong, out of date or missing — especially census figures, fees, permit processes or species records — send the correction with evidence. Corrections are logged publicly with a date and attribution, unless you ask otherwise.

← Visit / Access Governance →

Found an Error? Have a Source to Add?

Corrections are logged publicly with a date and attribution, unless you ask otherwise.