Erosion

This paper by Ajit Seshadri, Vigyan Vijay Foundation highlights the poor sanitation situation in India and argues that centralized approaches to wastewater treatment have had limited success and there is a need to make wastwater treatment people centric and effective through the use of decentralized systems such as DEWATS (Decentralized Wastewater Treatment Systems). DEWATS are locally organized and people driven systems that typically comprise a settler, anaerobic baffled tanks, filter beds of gravel and sand, and an open pond. The open pond or the polishing tank recreates a living environment for the wastewater to clean itself, naturally.Read More

This report by International Water Management Institute deals with the hydrology of the Upper Ganga river - the upper main branch of the river. To provide the background hydrological information for the assessment of environmental flow requirements at four selected ‘Environmental Flow’ sites, a hydrological model was set up to simulate the catchment in the present state (with water regulation  infrastructure) and to generate the natural flows (without water regulation infrastructure).

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This guide by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) seeks to assist countries and communities to take steps towards making marine and coastal ecosystem-based management operational, from strategic planning to on-site implementation. An important aim of this guide is to facilitate the implementation of UNEP’s overarching Ecosystem Management Programme and new Marine and Coastal Strategy in countries and regions in line with its Medium Term Strategy 2010-13.Read More

This paper in Current Science projects the need of relevant and pertinent datasets to develop a soil information system for Tripura. In view of the global changing scenario the need of the hour is to produce a fresh group of earth scientists with specialization in soil and crop science, geology and geography with appreciable knowledge in GIS and other information technology software.

In view of the global changing scenario with the developments of GIS and other web technologies, dissemination of spatial information is undergoing a paradigm shift. Natural resource information is an essential pre-requisite for monitoring and predicting global environmental changes with special reference to climate. The scientists will be equipped to deal with data storage, and retrieval in a user-friendly mode for management recommendations, so that issues like land degradation, biodiversity, food security and climate change can be addressed adequately. This organized information forms a basis for storing soil and land databases for the implementation and monitoring of various efforts on land resource management.

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