UTTAR PRADESH JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY

The Great Slaty Woodpecker Mulleripicuspulverulentus is among the largest extant woodpeckers and one of the few Asian members of the family Picidae assessed as globally threatened. Its reliance on structurally mature broadleaved forest, large-diameter trees and extensive ranging areas makes it an informative sentinel for the structural integrity of lowland and foothill forest across South and South-East Asia. This review evaluates the strength, consistency and limitations of the published evidence on the distribution, habitat associations, social organisation, reproductive ecology and threat exposure of the species, and examines how far that evidence supports inference for north-east India, a region that lies within the stated Indian range of the species. Sources were identified through searches of open bibliographic infrastructure, targeted searching of scholarly and institutional websites, and backward and forward citation tracking, and were appraised for design, spatial coverage, measurement validity and generalisability. Three conclusions follow. The association between the species and large-diameter, structurally mature stands is the best-supported relationship in the literature, replicated across Bornean, Malaysian, Nepalese and north-western Indian studies that used different designs, although the causal pathway linking tree size to demographic performance has not been measured directly. The social system, which involves persistent groups, cooperative breeding and territories that are large relative to body size, implies area requirements that many fragmented reserves are unlikely to satisfy, yet the underlying parameters derive from a small number of sites and short observation periods. The north-east Indian evidence base consists almost entirely of incidental records, and no density estimate, detection-corrected occupancy model, nest description or abundance trend has been published for the region. Confidence in current conservation prescriptions for north-east India is consequently low and rests on extrapolation from sal-dominated forests of different composition and management history. Priorities include region-specific occupancy and density surveys, acoustic monitoring, and appraisal of forests outside the protected area network.