Conservation Priority Regions in Uttara Kannada district: Using Amphibians as Surrogates

Gururaja KV^* and Ramachandra TV
Energy and Wetlands Research Group,
Centre for Ecological Sciences,
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore – 560012
gururaj@ces.iisc.ernet.in, cestvr@ces.iisc.ernet.in
^*Corresponding author

Amphibians are regarded as biological indicators and are used as surrogates in conservation and management practices. Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka is the second highest forested region in the entire stretch of Western Ghats (76.29% of its total geographical area). Nearly 80% of over 140 species described from Western Ghats, are endemic to the region. This paper prioritises the regions for conservation using amphibians as surrogates. We adapted river basin approach for sampling strategy, selecting four sampling localities in four major rivers of the district namely, Sharavathi, Aghanashini, Bedti and Kali. Sampling was carried out from 2003‐ 2008, with more emphasis during the monsoon. Ecological variables such as endemics, ecological status and habitat specialist; nineteen bioclimatic variables (worldclim data), in addition to altitude, canopy cover, and enumerated available micro‐habitats are used in the analysis. Multivariate analysis is carried to prioritize the regions of conservation importance in the district, which also indicated the regions with more number of endemic species of amphibians.

Modelling and Quantification of Temporal Forest Fragmentation

Uttam Kumar and Ramachandra TV
Centre for Ecological Sciences,
Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore 560 012
uttam@ces.iisc.ernet.in

Advances in remote sensing science with the availability of multi‐sensor, multi‐resolution and multi‐temporal data have enhanced our capability to analyse temporal changes in landscape patterns. With the urban population increasing at a rapid pace, the change is land use is obvious. Many of the large agricultural land and forest patches are being converted for anthropogenic uses, primarily residential, resulting in decreased forest wealth and sustainability. At this point, it would be relevant to perform landscape characterization, and quantification of the forest fragmentation to take account of the current status of the resources. The outcome would be promising for he local land‐use decisions and future actions. In this paper, remote sensing data of various resolutions are used to assess the land use dynamics. The data of low spatial resolution is pan sharpened with high spatial resolutions. The data are classified using pattern recognition techniques to obtain the land use classes. The forest fragmentation model is used to visualize the extent of forest fragmentation and to track the change in fragmentation over time. Based on the fragmentation indices, five different forest types are characterized‐ interior forest, edge forest, transitional forest, patch forest and undetermined forest. Applying the forest fragmentation model on a time series data provided a quantitative assessment of the temporal patterns in forest.

Effect of meteorological forcing and stratification variability in three morphometrically
different urban lakes in Kolkata metro city

^*N. R. Samal¹, A. Mazumdar², K. D. Jöhnk³ and F. Peeters^4
1Dept. of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, Durgapur –713 209,
West Bengal, India
²School of Water Resources Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata – 700 032, West Bengal,
India
³Leibniz‐Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Alte Fischerhütte 2, 16775
Neuglobsow, Germany.
⁴Limnologisches Institute, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany
^*Corresponding author: nihar_samal@yahoo.co.in; nihar.samal@nitdgp.ac.in

Synoptic water temperature measurements were taken in three tropical lakes located within the urban area of Kolkata metro city in eastern India to study the effects of morphometry and the changes in the weather on seasonal, short‐term as well as long‐term thermal stratification characteristics. Two basins, namely, K & N of the lake, Rabindra Sarobar are considered under identical meteorological forcing while the lake, Subash Sarobar, being comparatively deeper, is considered under different meteorological forcing. Both the Sarobars are separated by an air distance of about 9 km. The dominance of weather over morphometry on the water surface temperature response was illustrated by the synoptic discrete temperature measurements over 2249 Julian days. Stratification structure was also found to be dominated by weather for sufficiently deep lakes. Surface area effects were most subtle but explainable as sheltering effects. The onset of stratification was not, as traditionally described, a simple, gradual response of a lake to the annual solar radiation cycle. Rather it depends on a series of alternate heating, cooling, and mixing cycles similar to annual and diel cycles. The extensive continuous hourly thermal profiles indicating the hydrodynamical events such as stratification as well as mixing throughout that periods is predicted with the help of a one dimensional model and the changes in stratification in three morphometrically different lakes are well reflected in this present paper.

Multivariate analysis of Cauvery river water quality around KRS dam, Karnataka, India

Srikantaswamy, Siamak Gholami, Shakunthala Bai and Madhukar
Department of Environmental Science, University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Mysore 570 006,
Karnataka, India

It is important to make an assessment of quality for the best use of water resources distribution and utilization. So, study of the relationship of reservoir and river water quality monitoring is most essential aspect for future demand of water for various uses, e.g. irrigation, industries, public health and river conservation. In the present study an attempt has been made to evaluate water quality of Cauvery River around KRS Dam during summer 2008. Ecological parameters like Dissolved Oxygen, Chemical Oxygen Demand, Biochemical Oxygen Demand, and chemical parameters like Total Hardness, Total Alkalinity, Chloride, Nitrate, Phosphate, Sulphate and physical parameters like Temperature, pH, Specific Conductance, Turbidity, Total Solids, Total. Dissolved Solid (TDS), Suspended Solids (SS) were analysed and the results were compared with standard permissible limits and hydrological aspect to assess the best designated use of river water for various purposes. Analysis were carried out with various chemical techniques to determine the various physico‐chemical characteristics. The differences in various parameters were statistically significant (p<0.01) when compared for the upstream and downstream stretches of the river, particularly in summer. Seasonal water quality has been calculated by correlating various parameters analysed and is compared with WHO standards.

Application of Artificial Neural Network in Modelling of Algal Blooms– An Overview

Mageshkumar P¹ and Amal Raj S^2
1Student, M.E‐Environmental Engineering, Centre for Environmental Studies, Anna University
Chennai, Chennai 600 025, India. E‐mail: mageshee@gmail.com.
²Assistant Professor, Centre for Environmental Studies, Anna University Chennai, Chennai
600025, India. E‐mail: amalrajz@yahoo.com.

Explosions like formation of algal blooms increasingly pollute both salt and fresh water ecosystems throughout the world. Owing to its negative impacts on human health and aquatic life, this widely reported phenomenon has become a serious environmental problem. While many process based, statistical and empirical models exist for water quality prediction, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models are increasingly being used for water related applications because ANNs are often capable of modelling complex systems for which behavioral rules or underlying physical processes are either unknown or difficult to simulate. Theoretical knowledge about biological processes can be easily embedded into Neural Network models by means of a constrained training procedure. It is a complex non-linear function with many parameters that are adjusted (calibrated or trained) in such a way that the network output becomes similar to the measured output on a known data set. The feed forward neural network models are effective in predicting the non-linear behaviour of algal blooms and the correlation values are as high as 0.95 between the measured and calculated values. This paper presents an overview and provides a systematic approach for modelling the algal blooms using Artificial Neural Networks.

Application of Fuzzy Indices to determine the trophic status of Pulicat Lagoon, Southeast Coast of India

Harini Santhanam¹, Mageshkumar P² and Amal Raj S^3
1Research scholar, Centre for Environmental Studies, Anna University Chennai,
Chennai 600 025, India
²Student, M.E‐Environmental Engineering, CEG, Anna University Chennai,
Chennai 600 025, India
³Assistant Professor, Centre for Environmental Studies, Anna University Chennai,
Chennai 600 025, India

In the past few years, soft computing techniques, such as fuzzy logic, neural networks and cellular automata that are capable of handling the uncertainty in data and analysis have been used in ecosystem modelling. Fuzzy logic can be used to model non-linear relationships easily and effectively even when only limited data is available. Hence it is possible to construct a fuzzy model based on the known relationships between water quality parameters and the Chlorophyll-a pigment in lagoon waters to obtain the trophic status using the available dataset.
Thus in the present study, standard fuzzy relationships in the form of the fuzzy intersection, were constructed to determine the combined acceptability of chlorophyll –a concentration (as primary productivity), as the lowest of the partial acceptabilities of six major influencing variables – water temperature, secchi disk depth, salinity, dissolved oxygen, total nitrogen, total phosphorus in the water - as an indicator of the trophic status of the lagoon in the years 2005 and 2006. The results obtained from the present study showed that Pulicat lagoon was oligotrophic during the post monsoon and premonsoon periods of 2005, slightly eutrophic in summer of 2005 and mesotrophic during the monsoon periods. The trend was observed to be similar during 2006, excluding the premonsoon period which exhibited oligotrophic condition in the 2006. Evaluation of the performance of the newly created fuzzy model implied that the indices derived using the present method were good representations of the observed actual field conditions.

Prediction of Pan Evaporation Using Artificial Neural Networks

Prof. Mahesh Endait
Lecturer,
K.K. Wagh I.E.E.R. Nashik
e‐mail:maheshendait@yahoo.com

Prof.N.D.Choudhari
Asst.Prof.
K.K. Wagh I.E.E.R. Nashik
E‐mail: choudhari_nd@rediff.com

Water is scarce resource. Scarcity of water may lead to world war-III. Availability of water resources and its management has become important to every nation. Every year billions of cubic meters of water is lost due to evaporation. Present work is a small effort to study the effect plastic balls cover in pan evaporimeter. It was observed in the present study that use of plastic balls in a pan evaporimeter shown considerable reduction in the evaporation loss. Entire area coverage for lake practically may not be feasible therefore study was carried for 25%, 50% 75% and 100% area covered with white plastic balls in a evaporimeter.This study can be simulated to water bodies of dams and lakes. it is observed for 75% coverage of white balls average reduction in evaporation loss was 3.89 mm/day, For 75 % coverage of white balls maximum reduction in evaporation ,loss was noted on 29-05-2008.. Further study may conclude into a good conclusion, which shall help the society to save precious commodity in the form of water.

Diversity Models for Planktonic Algae in Lake Ecosystems

Dr. Shankar Hosmani P,
Professor and Head, Department of Biotechnology,
SBRR Mahajana First Grade College, Jayalakshmipuram, Mysore‐570012
e. mail: sph_prof@yahoo.com

Ecologists have designed a large range of indices and models for measuring diversity and yet diversity is so hard to define. This is because diversity consists of two components. First, the variety and secondly the relative abundance of species. Diversity can be measured by recording the number of species, by describing their relative abundance or by using a measure which combines the two components. Investigations of ecological diversity are often restricted to species richness, which is a direct count of the number of species present. As is observed no community consists of species of equal abundance. A majority of species are rare, while a number are moderately common, with the remaining few species being very abundant (Magurran, 1983). A variety of species abundance distributions have been proposed to describe the observed patterns. Environmental monitoring makes use of the fact that polluted or stressed communities are characterized by a change in their species abundances which often switch from being log normally distributed to  following a geometric series.
Diversity measures are more useful in lake ecosystems which harbor a large variety of algal species in general and species diversity within genera. Therefore application of species richness indices is essential. Secondly it is necessary to apply species abundance models which describe the distribution of species abundance. The diversity of a community may therefore be described by referring to the model which provides the closest fit to the observed pattern of species abundance.

Lake Monitoring using Satellite Image based on Deformable Model

S.N. Omkar1^*, Senthilnath J^1
1Department of Aerospace Engineering, IISc, Bangalore, 560012
^*Email‐id: omkar@aero.iisc.ernet.in

Conservation and management of water resource involves source of water coverage information that are potentially useful to humans. By nature, this precious gift can be expanded or destroyed. To make best use of water and its natural resource, we need good factual knowledge of the water and its coverage. Accurate knowledge on water-coverage is very vital for planning efficient use of water. Further this information can be used to audit water usage, in the context of urban/rural planning. One of the main sources which can capture the temporal nature of the knowledge is the satellite image. In this paper, we present a satellite image processing framework for precise assessment of water coverage mapping using deformable model for the problem of lake monitoring for an urban region. The deformation method is used to extract boundaries and to determine the extent of water covered region. The performance of the various deformation algorithms has been evaluated.

Nygaard’s Algal Index in Determination of Trophic State of Lake Ecosystem

M.K. Mahesh and S. P. Hosmani

Nygaard proposed five indices to evaluate organic pollution in lake waters.  They include Cyanophycean or Myxophycean index, Chlorophycean index, Bacillariophycean index, Euglenophycean index and a compound quotient.  A large, but slightly polluted lake; Hadhinaru Lake was selected for the present study for a period of one year.  Standard methods were used for the collection, preservation and enumeration of algae which were identified and classified into five groups.  Nygaard’s indices were calculated and the trophic state of the lake was determined. Myxophycean index showed that the lake tends from oligotrophic to eutrophic nature.  Chlorophycean index indicates that the lake water is eutrophic.  Euglenophycean index shows that the lake water is mainly oligotrophic (indicating less organic pollution) but later tends to be eutrophic.  The compound quotient indicates that the lake water always tends to become eutrophic.  Bacillariophycean index cannot be calculated as the lake did not show the presence of centric diatoms. Nygaard’s index is simple and easy to calculate and can be used as an important tool in determining the trophic state of Lake Ecosystem.

Forest fragmentation in a Micro watershed of West Himalaya

Yadav A, Kumar U and Ramchandra TV
Centre for ecological studies, IISc, Bangalore.
E Mail: amit503sm@gmail.com, uttam@ces.iisc.ernet.in, cestvr@ces.iisc.ernet.in

Forest fragmentation is the process whereby a large, continuous area of forest is either reduced in spatial extent or divided into two or more fragments. The decline in the size of the forest and the increasing isolation between the two remnant patches of the forest is the major cause of declining biodiversity. Fragmentation was studied in relation to land use type. The pattern and extent of fragmentation were quantified using established indices for a micro watershed in the catchment basin of river Sutlej, Shimla district, Himachal Pradesh. Anthropogenic influences in fragmentation of forests are evident from the significant correlation between the extent of agriculture and barren area with most of fragmentation indices.