The Asian elephants Elephas maximus of Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam: status and conservation of a vanishing population

This study updates the status and conservation of the Endangered Asian elephant Elephas maximus in Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam. Line transect indirect surveys, block surveys for elephant signs, village surveys of elephant-human conflict incidents, guard-post surveys for records of sightings, and surveys of elephant food plants were undertaken during the dry and wet seasons of 2001. A minimum of 11 elephants and a maximum of 15-17 elephants was estimated for c. 500 km2 of the Park and its vicinity. The elephants are largely confined to the southern boundary of the Park and make extensive use of the adjoining La Nga State Forest Enterprises. During the dry season the elephants depend on at least 26 species of wild and cultivated plants, chiefly the fruits of cashew. Most of the villages surveyed reported some elephant-human conflict. Two adult male elephants seem to cover a large area to raid crops, whereas the family groups restrict themselves to a few villages; overall, the conflict is not serious. Since 2001 there have been no reports of any deaths or births of elephants in the Park. We make recommendations for habitat protection and management, increasing the viability of the small population, reducing elephant-human conflicts, and improving the chances of survival of the declining elephants of this Park. The Government has now approved an Action Plan for Urgent Conservation Areas in Vietnam that calls for the establishment of three elephant conservation areas in the country, including Cat Tien National Park.

Turbulence in the two-dimensional Fourier-truncated Gross-Pitaevskii equation

We undertake a systematic, direct numerical simulation of the twodimensional, Fourier-truncated, Gross-Pitaevskii equation to study the turbulent evolutions of its solutions for a variety of initial conditions and a wide range of parameters. We find that the time evolution of this system can be classified into four regimes with qualitatively different statistical properties. Firstly, there are transients that depend on the initial conditions. In the second regime, powerlaw scaling regions, in the energy and the occupation-number spectra, appear and start to develop; the exponents of these power laws and the extents of the scaling regions change with time and depend on the initial condition. In the third regime, the spectra drop rapidly for modes with wave numbers k > kc and partial thermalization takes place for modes with k < kc; the self-truncation wave number kc(t) depends on the initial conditions and it grows either as a power of t or as log t. Finally, in the fourth regime, complete thermalization is achieved and, if we account for finite-size effects carefully, correlation functions and spectra are consistent with their nontrivial Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless forms. Our work is a natural generalization of recent studies of thermalization in the Euler and other hydrodynamical equations; it combines ideas from fluid dynamics and turbulence, on the one hand, and equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics on the other.

Forest area estimation and reporting: implications for conservation, management and REDD

Periodic estimation, monitoring and reporting on area under forest and plantation types and afforestation rates are critical to forest and biodiversity conservation, sustainable forest management and for meeting international commitments. This article is aimed at assessing the adequacy of the current monitoring and reporting approach adopted in India in the context of new challenges of conservation and reporting to international conventions and agencies. The analysis shows that the current mode of monitoring and reporting of forest area is inadequate to meet the national and international requirements. India could be potentially over-reporting the area under forests by including many non-forest tree categories such as commercial plantations of coconut, cashew, coffee and rubber, and fruit orchards. India may also be under-reporting deforestation by reporting only gross forest area at the state and national levels. There is a need for monitoring and reporting of forest cover, deforestation and afforestation rates according to categories such as (i) natural/primary forest, (ii) secondary/degraded forests, (iii) forest plantations, (iv) commercial plantations, (v) fruit orchards and (vi) scattered trees.

Energy based approach for the evaluation of damage under partial slip and gross sliding condition

Three possible contact conditions may prevail at a contact interface depending on the magnitude of normal and tangential loads, that is, stick condition, partial slip condition or gross sliding condition. Numerical techniques have been used to evaluate the stress field under partial slip and gross sliding condition. Cattaneo and Mindlin approach has been adapted to model partial slip condition. Shear strain energy density and normalized strain energy release rate have been evaluated at the surface and in the subsurface region. It is apparent from the present study that the shear strain energy density gives a fair prediction for the nucleation of damage, whereas the propagation of the crack is controlled by normalized strain energy release rate. Further, it has been observed that the intensity of damage strongly depends on coefficient of friction and contact conditions prevailing at the contact interface. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.