This working paper describe the context and challenges of landscape-scale conservation amidst plantations and forests and other tropical ecosystems in the Western Ghats, India. Agricultural expansion has historically been the major global cause for the loss and fragmentation of natural ecosystems, and today remains one of the largest threats to the world’s remaining tropical forests. In tropical region, conservation concerns have arisen over the implications of the anticipated increase of as much as 25% in the area under agriculture. Concomitant with biodiversity loss due to extinctions, the loss of tropical forests may lead to decrease in ecosystem services of great value to humanity such as carbon storage in biomass and soils, watershed regulation and rainfall, modulation of climate and river flows, amelioration of infectious disease and human – wildlife conflicts.