Sir David Frederick Attenborough is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
The Western Ghats, also known as the Sahyadri mountain range, is a mountain range that covers an area of 160,000 km2 (62,000 sq mi) in a stretch of 1,600 km (990 mi) parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, traversing the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world. It is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India. It contains a very large proportion of the country's flora and fauna, many of which are endemic to this region. The Western Ghats are older than the Himalayas. They influence Indian monsoon weather patterns by intercepting the rain-laden monsoon winds that sweep in from the south-west during late summer. The range runs north to south along the western edge of the Deccan Plateau and separates the plateau from a narrow coastal plain called the Western Coastal Plains along the Arabian Sea. A total of 39 areas in the Western Ghats, including national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and reserve forests, were designated as world heritage sites in 2012 – twenty in Kerala, ten in Karnataka, six in Tamil Nadu and four in Maharashtra.
The Blue Planet is a British nature documentary series created and co-produced by the BBC and Discovery Channel. It premiered on 12 September 2001 in the United Kingdom. It is narrated by David Attenborough.
The BBC Studios Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of BBC Studios that produces television, radio and online content with a natural history or wildlife theme. It is best known for its highly regarded nature documentaries, including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and has a long association with David Attenborough's authored documentaries, starting with 1979's Life on Earth.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on video taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world.
Planet Earth is a 2006 British television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Five years in the making, it was the most expensive nature documentary series ever commissioned by the BBC and also the first to be filmed in high definition. The series received multiple awards, including four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and an award from the Royal Television Society.
Nigel Alan Marven is a British wildlife TV presenter, naturalist, conservationist, author, and television producer. He is best known as presenter of the BBC miniseries Chased by Dinosaurs, its sequel, Sea Monsters, as well as the ITV miniseries Prehistoric Park. He is also known for his unorthodox, spontaneous, and daring style of presenting wildlife documentaries as well as for including factual knowledge in the proceedings.
Krupakar and Senani are wildlife photographers from Karnataka, India. They have produced the wildlife film Wild Dog Diaries for National Geographic Channel. For this documentary they won the following awards:
Life is a British nature documentary series created and produced by the BBC in association with The Open University. It was first broadcast as part of the BBC's Darwin Season on BBC One and BBC HD from October to December 2009. The series takes a global view of the specialised strategies and extreme behaviour that living things have developed in order to survive; what Charles Darwin termed "the struggle for existence". Four years in the making, the series was shot entirely in high definition.
Kishore Kumar G, known mononymously as Kishore, is an Indian actor who appears predominantly in Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu films. He gained popularity for portraying the character of Veerappan in the Kannada film Attahasa in 2013. Recently, he got pan India recognition for his performance in The Family Man, Ponniyin Selvan: I, Ponniyin Selvan: II and Kantara.
Madagascar is a British nature documentary series, first broadcast on BBC Two and BBC HD in February 2011. Produced by the BBC Natural History Unit and Animal Planet and narrated by David Attenborough, the three-part series focuses on the landscape and wildlife of the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Attenborough also appears briefly on camera at the beginning and end of the series. Each episode is followed by a ten-minute Madagascar Diaries segment, illustrating the techniques used to film a particular subject.
Ricky Kej is a three-time Grammy Award-winning Indian music composer and environmentalist. He has performed at venues in over 30 countries including at the United Nations headquarters in New York and Geneva. In December 2022, Kej was announced as a UNHCR "Goodwill Ambassador".
Africa is a 2013 British television series created by the BBC Natural History Unit. It focuses on wildlife and wild habitats in Africa, and was four years in the making. It consists of six hour-long episodes and six 10-minute-long featurettes.
Pench National Park is a national park in India's Madhya Pradesh state, established in 1975 with an area of 257.26 km2 (99.33 sq mi). It includes Pench Tiger Reserve and derives its name from the Pench River that flows through the park from north to south dividing the park into almost equal western and eastern halves, the well-forested areas of Seoni and Chhindwara districts respectively. It was declared a sanctuary in 1965, raised to the status of national park in 1975 and enlisted as a tiger reserve in 1992. In 1983 it was declared as National Park.
Amoghavarsha JS is an Indian filmmaker and wildlife photographer. In 2021, Amoghavarsha won the 67th National Film Awards for his film "Wild Karnataka" as the Best Exploration/Adventure Film, It is narrated by Sir David Attenborough and also won the Best Narration/Voice Over award. He is the art director on Grammy® Award Album "Divine Tides" by Ricky Kej at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards and 65th Annual Grammy Awards. His video work on climate change was showcased in the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President François Hollande. He addressed the United Nations headquarters in 2020 when his movie Wild Karnataka was screened there. His film Kali has won the Impactdocs Award of Merit and the Australia India Youth Dialogue alumni grant for the year 2015
Naresh Bedi is an Indian filmmaker, the eldest of the Bedi Brothers and a member of the second generation of three generations of Wildlife photographers and filmmakers. He is the first Asian to receive a Wildscreen Panda Award and the first Indian to receive a wildlife film nomination for the British Academy Film Awards. He was honoured by the Government of India in 2015 with Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
Kalyan Varma is a Bangalore-based wildlife emmy nominated filmmaker, photographer and conservationist. He is one of the founders of Peepli Project, co-director of Nature InFocus nature and wildlife festival, and founding member of India Nature Watch. He currently freelances with BBC Natural History, Netflix, Discovery Channel, National Geographic and Disney+, and also works with grassroots NGOs like Nature Conservation Foundation to highlight environmental issues in India. He is a recipient of the National film awards for his film Wild Karnataka and Carl Zeiss Wildlife Conservation Award.
Charan Raj is an Indian composer and singer known for his work in Kannada cinema. For his work in Jeerjimbe (2016), he was awarded the Karnataka State Film Award for Best Music Director.
Our Planet is a British nature documentary series made for Netflix. The series is narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, led by Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey, who also created BBC documentary series Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and The Blue Planet, in collaboration with the conservation charity World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The soundtrack was composed by Steven Price.
Sangita Iyer is an Indian-born Canadian author, broadcast journalist, writer, biologist and documentary filmmaker. She is known for her advocacy on wildlife conservation, especially for wild elephants, and for exposing the atrocities against Asian elephants by religious institutions. Iyer has been featured in the BBC News. She is the founding executive director and president of the Voice for Asian Elephants Society, which was created in 2016 with the aim of protecting wild and captive elephants of India.
