Occurrences of Human Wild Pig Conflict in Tamil Nadu - India

The study was carried out to assess the Human wild pig conflict and how the occurrences of conflict varied with the climatic factors.

The areas adjoining the Mudumalai wildlife region, Sathyamangalam wildlife region and Anaimalai wildlife region of Tamil Nadu, India were included in this study programme.

The documentation of the quantifiable meteorological factors in the identified conflict areas was done using the weather portal of TNAU. The occurrences of conflict were also classified as low, medium and high based on the intensity.

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Impact of Geophysics in Small-Scale Mining

Geological exploration for new mining ventures involves drilling campaigns, an expensive activity that maytake significant time, with no guarantee of financial success.

Small-Scale Mining

The literature review indicated that the average cost of drilling may reach over US $100 per meter drilled, and that the use of Geophysics can reduce by 30% to 50% the number of negative drill holes (holes that does not intercept the mineral ore body), thus reducing time and cost of mineral exploration. This paper shows how the application of Geophysics in two small-scale mining operations, a limestone and manganese mine, resulted in reduced exploration time with satisfactory results for the companies. In the limestone mine, Geophysics allowed the updating of the geological model. In the manganese mine, it contributed to the generation of a preliminary geological model for the deposit. In both cases, there was a significant reduction of the time spent on exploration.

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Accra Flood Modelling through Application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing Techniques and Analytical Hierarchy Process

Urban Flooding is one of world’s problems in recent times because of its frequent occurrence which results in loss of lives and properties. The first step in flood management is the development of hazard maps.

Flood hazard mapping forms the foundation of the decision-making process by providing information which is essential to the understanding of nature and characteristics of flooding to risk community or city.

Flood modelling is a complex problem and therefore a lot of factors should be considered before the final map showing flood prone areas are produced.

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The Water Isotopic Version of the Land-Surface Model ORCHIDEE: Implementation, Evaluation, Sensitivity to Hydrological Parameters

Land-Surface Models (LSMs) exhibit large spread and uncertainties in the way they partition precipitation into surface runoff, drainage, transpiration and bare soil evaporation.

To explore to what extent water isotope measurements could help evaluate the simulation of the soil water budget in LSMs, water stable isotopes have been implemented in the ORCHIDEE (ORganizing Carbon and Hydrology In Dynamic EcosystEms: the land-surface model) LSM.

This article presents this implementation and the evaluation of simulations both in a stand-alone mode and coupled with an atmospheric general circulation model.

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Infill Development: an Approach to the Optimal and Intelligent Development of Cities - Case Study: Zone 8 of Tabriz

One of the most important issues in the development of modern cities is the dispersed and horizontal expansion of cities.

Due to a substantial effect of the form of a city on its stability, it is necessary to know study and understand its different dimensions and guide it to achieve sustainable development.

Thus, infill development that is the simplest interpretation of urban endogenous development is considered as one of the urban smart growth strategies. Focusing on the vacant and abandoned lands in cities, infill development tries to load development on these lands.

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Perspectives of Forest Biodiversity Conservation in Northeast India

Forests are major repositories of biodiversity and provide essential goods and services for humanity. Biodiversity loss is a major threat to forest ecosystem and emerging as a great challenge to humanity.

Estimation of biodiversity or biological richness of a region is a difficult task that is an impossible goal without technological inputs. The Northeast India, part of Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, is one of the still relatively undisturbed regions of the world harbouring almost 50% of the flowering plant of the Indian subcontinent.

This region is economically less developed and forests are under tremendous pressure from the anthropogenic influences mainly due to the local traditional shifting (jhum) cultivation practices.

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Prokaryotes: A Promising Agent in Environmental Bioremediation

Since long been known that microorganisms have different functions and unique detoxification of contaminated soil and, in recent years, this process is called bioremediation or bio reclamation.

The role of microorganisms and their limits for bioremediation is to better understand so they can be used more effectively. The application of the principles of microbial ecology to improve the methodology.

 Improving the microbial degradation to ensure the in-situ cleaning of contaminated soils has stimulated much research. Rhizosphere is an area of more microbial activity can improve the conversion and degradation of contaminants.

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Soil Erosion Assessment of the Poyang Lake Basin, China: Using USLE, GIS and Remote Sensing

Soil erosion is one of the most critical eco-environmental issues in the Poyang Lake basin, China. The purpose of this study is to discover the spatial pattern of soil erosion, and predict soil loss and sediment yield, and evaluate soil loss impacts on main reservoirs by using Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), GIS and Remote Sensing (RS).

Firstly, five erosion factors including rainfall erosivity (R), soil erodibility (K), topographic factor (LS), cover and management factor(C), and conservation supporting practice factor (P) were calculated and analyzed, respectively.

Secondly, annual soil erosion and its spatial distribution were evaluated, and sediment yield was subsequently predicted.

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Recycling as an Object of Study for Behavioural Sciences

The principle that has infused the recycling of waste is sustainability and, of course, the effectiveness and efficiency of recycling. It is this conviction and this value that has consolidated the field of social marketing as an ethical and cost effective approach to the study and promotion of recycling.

In this context, the aim of this article is simply to present the precursor disciplines pertaining to the analysis of recycling from the perspective of the social sciences, of which social marketing has become one of the most advanced approaches.

Similarly, it is not only to briefly review the present state of affairs, but also to propose some future lines of research, so that the objective study of recycling can continue progressing.

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Simulated Impact of Intensification of Irrigation on Indian Monsoon Rainfall and Surface Fluxes

Using Bio-sphere Atmosphere Transfer scheme (BATS) coupled regional climate model (RegCM4) the impact of intensification of irrigation on Indian monsoon atmospheric circulations and surface fluxes is being studied.

Land use/land cover change is performed in the model to study the design or sensitivity experiments. This is implemented by changing the vegetation/landuse type in the model.

Impact of increase in irrigation activity over Central India and Northwestern region of India is still an open question and hence it is attempted to answer them in this research work.

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Thermodynamics Reason for Dying of Urmia Lake, This is not Just an Aral Syndrome!

Urmia Lake is located in a closed basin between both the West and Eastern Azerbaijan provinces in the north-west of Iran (37°4’-38°17’ N and 45°-46°E).

The lake in its current form can be seen in Figure 1. Urmia Lake is one of the most saline lakes, as well as the second largest, in the world and the largest lake on the Iranian Plateau.

Surface flow, direct rainfall, and groundwater create the majority of the sources for the lake.

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Role of Cyclonic Storm as Natural Disaster and other Factors on Vulture Mortality in India

Post mortem analyses in vultures across India and its neighboring countries traced diclofenac and its derivative compounds in their carcasses. Therefore, it is inferred that biomagnification of diclofenac from the consumed infected domestic animal carcasses contributes mortality by causing renal failure and hepatic damages in vultures.

However, reports also indicate that both extrinsic environmental and intrinsic cellular causes might also be contributing factors. It offers a debate to confirm whether only diclofenac is the primary cause of vulture mortality versus their susceptibility to microbial pathogens, diseases or physiological conditions, such as oxidative stress due to diclofenac biomagnification.

It is observed that natural disasters such as heavy cyclonic storm which affect arboreal life may be one of the major causes of the death of vultures in some parts of India. Therefore, extrinsic insults such as heavy cyclonic storms are believed to be also contributing factor to affect arboreal life including vultures in some other parts of the world. A perspective is made on the above facts as a cause of catastrophic mortality of vultures in India.

Monitoring Forest Cover Change of Margalla Hills Over a Period of Two Decades (1992-2011): A Spatiotemporal Perspective

Forests play a critical role in the provision of the ecological interconnectedness, and essential ecosystem services. Deforestation is a serious environmental problem throughout the world including Pakistan where a striking depletion of forest reserves has been an ecological concern for quite some time.

Remote sensing techniques have been used to monitor land use and forest cover changes. The present study aims at visualizing the potential impacts of climate change and declining forest reserves on Margalla Hills National Park (MHNP).

ERDAS Imagine 9.1 and ArcGIS 10.2 softwares were employed for the spatial and temporal analysis and visualization of over the past two decades.

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Farmers Choice of Crops in Canadian Prairies under Climate Change: An Econometric Analysis

As climate is an uncontrollable yet essential input in the agriculture industry, the impact of climate change may have on crop production in Saskatchewan is of importance.

The main objective of this study is to investigate how farmers would adapt to climate change by switching their crop mix under future climate change scenarios.

A fractional multinomial logit (FMNL) model was used to assess how total area of cropland has changed over a thirty year time period.

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One World Community, Nearing Reality-Let it Snow!

November 21, 2014: Caught in the immobilizing Buffalo snowstorm you may have seen on your television sets, yesterday I received a valuable communication from an unmet colleague in Beijing, representing a University there that I actually visited and lectured for in October 1983 on bioengineering topics.

The occasion of this recent contact was in reaction to my electronic response to his team’s excellent article that just appeared in a specialty Journal, thus opening the way to our international collaboration on an important topic.

My message to him, along with a slide summary of our older data, had been publicly presented only in Sweden in the year 2003-and was poorly known otherwise.

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Lignocellulosic Residues for Biorefineries

The biorefinery concept is an important strategy in the development of biomass usage. It is based on the productive biomass chain similar to the oil chain fuels, energy, materials, bulk chemicals, and fine chemicals are the final products with a large variation in their market value.

Biorefineries use a large number of conversion processes (chemical, biochemical, and thermochemical) as a result of the chemical diversity of biomass and the high content of oxygen and water.

The increase in the demand for bio-derived chemicals not only offers a great number of opportunities for green technologies and processes which use lignocellulosic biomass in biorefineries, applying the green chemistry principles.

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