A landscape-level assessment of Asian elephant habitat, its population and elephant-human conflict in the Anamalai hill ranges of southern Western Ghats, India

Spatial information at the landscape scale is extremely important for conservation planning, especially in the case of long-ranging vertebrates. The biodiversity-rich Anamalai hill ranges in the Western Ghats of southern India hold a viable population for the long-term conservation of the Asian elephant. Through rapid but extensive field surveys we mapped elephant habitat, corridors, vegetation and land-use patterns, estimated the elephant population density and structure, and assessed elephant-human conflict across this landscape. GIS and remote sensing analyses indicate that elephants are distributed among three blocks over a total area of about 4600 km(2). Approximately 92% remains contiguous because of four corridors; however, under 4000 km2 of this area may be effectively used by elephants. Nine landscape elements were identified, including five natural vegetation types, of which tropical moist deciduous forest is dominant. Population density assessed through the dung count method using line transects covering 275 km of walk across the effective elephant habitat of the landscape yielded a mean density of 1.1 (95% Cl = 0.99-1.2) elephant/km(2). Population structure from direct sighting of elephants showed that adult male elephants constitute just 2.9% and adult females 42.3% of the population with the rest being subadults (27.4%), juveniles (16%) and calves (11.4%). Sex ratios show an increasing skew toward females from juvenile (1:1.8) to sub-adult (1:2.4) and adult (1:14.7) indicating higher mortality of sub-adult and adult males that is most likely due to historical poaching for ivory. A rapid questionnaire survey and secondary data on elephant-human conflict from forest department records reveals that villages in and around the forest divisions on the eastern side of landscape experience higher levels of elephant-human conflict than those on the western side; this seems to relate to a greater degree of habitat fragmentation and percentage farmers cultivating annual crops in the east. We provide several recommendations that could help maintain population viability and reduce elephant-human conflict of the Anamalai elephant landscape. (C) 2013 Deutsche Gesellschaft far Saugetierkunde. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Form and Function of Proteins. Historical Background and the Indian Effort in Macromolecular Crystallography

Global efforts in macromolecular crystallography started in the thirties of the last century. However, definitive results began to emerge only in the late fifties and the early sixties. India has a long tradition in crystallography. The country had a head start in theoretical and computational structural biology, thanks to the efforts of G.N. Ramachandran and his colleagues in the fifties and the sixties. However, macromolecular crystallography got off the ground in India only in the eighties, particularly after the Bangalore group received adequate support from the Department of Science and Technology under their Thrust Area Programme. The Bangalore centre was also identified as a national nucleus for the development of the area in the country. Since then work in the area has spread widely and is being carried out by several groups, mainly led by scientists trained at Bangalore or their descendents, in about thirty institutions in India. In addition to the Department of Science and Technology, the effort is now supported by other agencies like the Department of Biotechnology and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. The problems addressed by macromolecular crystallographers in India encompass almost all aspects of modern biology. Indian efforts in macromolecular crystallography have also become an important component of the international efforts in the area.

Time-Based All-Digital Technique for Analog Built-in Self-Test

A scheme for built-in self-test of analog signals with minimal area overhead for measuring on-chip voltages in an all-digital manner is presented. The method is well suited for a distributed architecture, where the routing of analog signals over long paths is minimized. A clock is routed serially to the sampling heads placed at the nodes of analog test voltages. This sampling head present at each test node, which consists of a pair of delay cells and a pair of flip-flops, locally converts the test voltage to a skew between a pair of subsampled signals, thus giving rise to as many subsampled signal pairs as the number of nodes. To measure a certain analog voltage, the corresponding subsampled signal pair is fed to a delay measurement unit to measure the skew between this pair. The concept is validated by designing a test chip in a UMC 130-nm CMOS process. Sub-millivolt accuracy for static signals is demonstrated for a measurement time of a few seconds, and an effective number of bits of 5.29 is demonstrated for low-bandwidth signals in the absence of sample-and-hold circuitry.

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.

AIM-Spice Integration of a Recursive Model for Threshold Voltage Shift in Thin Film Transistors

Non-crystalline semiconductor based thin film transistors are the building blocks of large area electronic systems. These devices experience a threshold voltage shift with time due to prolonged gate bias stress. In this paper we integrate a recursive model for threshold voltage shift with the open source BSIM4V4 model of AIM-Spice. This creates a tool for circuit simulation for TFTs. We demonstrate the integrity of the model using several test cases including display driver circuits.

Dynamic Site Characterization and Correlation of Shear Wave Velocity with Standard Penetration Test `N' Values for the City of Agartala, Tripura State, India

Seismic site characterization is the basic requirement for seismic microzonation and site response studies of an area. Site characterization helps to gauge the average dynamic properties of soil deposits and thus helps to evaluate the surface level response. This paper presents a seismic site characterization of Agartala city, the capital of Tripura state, in the northeast of India. Seismically, Agartala city is situated in the Bengal Basin zone which is classified as a highly active seismic zone, assigned by Indian seismic code BIS-1893, Indian Standard Criteria for Earthquake Resistant Design of Structures, Part-1 General Provisions and Buildings. According to the Bureau of Indian Standards, New Delhi (2002), it is the highest seismic level (zone-V) in the country. The city is very close to the Sylhet fault (Bangladesh) where two major earthquakes (M (w) > 7) have occurred in the past and affected severely this city and the whole of northeast India. In order to perform site response evaluation, a series of geophysical tests at 27 locations were conducted using the multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW) technique, which is an advanced method for obtaining shear wave velocity (V (s)) profiles from in situ measurements. Similarly, standard penetration test (SPT-N) bore log data sets have been obtained from the Urban Development Department, Govt. of Tripura. In the collected data sets, out of 50 bore logs, 27 were selected which are close to the MASW test locations and used for further study. Both the data sets (V (s) profiles with depth and SPT-N bore log profiles) have been used to calculate the average shear wave velocity (V (s)30) and average SPT-N values for the upper 30 m depth of the subsurface soil profiles. These were used for site classification of the study area recommended by the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP) manual. The average V (s)30 and SPT-N classified the study area as seismic site class D and E categories, indicating that the city is susceptible to site effects and liquefaction. Further, the different data set combinations between V (s) and SPT-N (corrected and uncorrected) values have been used to develop site-specific correlation equations by statistical regression, as `V (s)' is a function of SPT-N value (corrected and uncorrected), considered with or without depth. However, after considering the data set pairs, a probabilistic approach has also been presented to develop a correlation using a quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot. A comparison has also been made with the well known published correlations (for all soils) available in the literature. The present correlations closely agree with the other equations, but, comparatively, the correlation of shear wave velocity with the variation of depth and uncorrected SPT-N values provides a more suitable predicting model. Also the Q-Q plot agrees with all the other equations. In the absence of in situ measurements, the present correlations could be used to measure V (s) profiles of the study area for site response studies.

An open source massively parallel solver for Richards equation: Mechanistic modelling of water fluxes at the watershed scale

In this paper we present a massively parallel open source solver for Richards equation, named the RichardsFOAM solver. This solver has been developed in the framework of the open source generalist computational fluid dynamics tool box OpenFOAM (R) and is capable to deal with large scale problems in both space and time. The source code for RichardsFOAM may be downloaded from the CPC program library website. It exhibits good parallel performances (up to similar to 90% parallel efficiency with 1024 processors both in strong and weak scaling), and the conditions required for obtaining such performances are analysed and discussed. These performances enable the mechanistic modelling of water fluxes at the scale of experimental watersheds (up to few square kilometres of surface area), and on time scales of decades to a century. Such a solver can be useful in various applications, such as environmental engineering for long term transport of pollutants in soils, water engineering for assessing the impact of land settlement on water resources, or in the study of weathering processes on the watersheds. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Strength and Deformation Characteristics of Fly Ash Mixed with Randomly Distributed Plastic Waste

In order to explore the potential use of fly ash and plastic waste in bulk quantities in civil engineering applications, it is necessary to understand the behavior of fly ash and fly ash mixed with plastic waste. These materials are considered as wastes and in this study, it is shown that combination of fly ash and plastic waste is very useful. In this regard, various tests such as classification tests, unconfined compressive strength and compressibility tests, consolidated undrained tests, and California bearing ratio tests were conducted. The results indicated that the inclusion of plastic waste in fly ash is effective in improving the engineering properties of fly ash in terms of compressive strength, shear strength parameters, and CBR values. In order to understand the effect of sample size on the shear strength parameters of fly ash and fly ash mixed with plastic waste, consolidated undrained tests were conducted with sample sizes of 38x76mm and 50x100mm. The results of the tests indicate that the shear strength increases with the increase in sample size. The implication of the use of fly ash mixed with plastic waste in unpaved roads is presented in terms of reduction of carbon print.

Development of a global inundation map at high spatial resolution from topographic downscaling of coarse-scale remote sensing data

Large-scale estimates of the area of terrestrial surface waters have greatly improved over time, in particular through the development of multi-satellite methodologies, but the generally coarse spatial resolution (tens of kms) of global observations is still inadequate for many ecological applications. The goal of this study is to introduce a new, globally applicable downscaling method and to demonstrate its applicability to derive fine resolution results from coarse global inundation estimates. The downscaling procedure predicts the location of surface water cover with an inundation probability map that was generated by bagged derision trees using globally available topographic and hydrographic information from the SRTM-derived HydroSHEDS database and trained on the wetland extent of the GLC2000 global land cover map. We applied the downscaling technique to the Global Inundation Extent from Multi-Satellites (GIEMS) dataset to produce a new high-resolution inundation map at a pixel size of 15 arc-seconds, termed GIEMS-D15. GIEMS-D15 represents three states of land surface inundation extents: mean annual minimum (total area, 6.5 x 10(6) km(2)), mean annual maximum (12.1 x 10(6) km(2)), and long-term maximum (173 x 10(6) km(2)); the latter depicts the largest surface water area of any global map to date. While the accuracy of GIEMS-D15 reflects distribution errors introduced by the downscaling process as well as errors from the original satellite estimates, overall accuracy is good yet spatially variable. A comparison against regional wetland cover maps generated by independent observations shows that the results adequately represent large floodplains and wetlands. GIEMS-D15 offers a higher resolution delineation of inundated areas than previously available for the assessment of global freshwater resources and the study of large floodplain and wetland ecosystems. The technique of applying inundation probabilities also allows for coupling with coarse-scale hydro-climatological model simulations. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved.

Mercury exposure Aasessment in fish and humans from Sundarban Mangrove Wetland of India

Present study had documented total mercury levels in six commonly consumed fish species, and performed across-sectional study on local residents to gauge their intake of fish (via dietary survey) and mercury exposure (via hair biomarker analyses). Mean total mercury content in edible composites of locally-caught fishes (topse, hilsa, mackerel, topse, sardinella, khoira) was low and ranged from 0.01 to 0.11 mu g g(-1) mercury, dry weight. In a cross-sectional study of 58 area residents, the mercury content in hair ranged from 0.25 to 1.23 mu g g(-1), with a mean of 0.65 +/- 0.23 mu g g(-1), Flair mercury level was not influenced by gender, age, or occupation. Mean number of meals consumed per week was 3.1 +/- 1.1, and all participants consumed at least one fish meal per week. When related to fish consumption, a significant positive association was found between number of fish meals consumed per week and hair mercury levels.

Comparative evaluation of inversion approaches of the radiative transfer model for estimation of crop biophysical parameters

The inversion of canopy reflectance models is widely used for the retrieval of vegetation properties from remote sensing. This study evaluates the retrieval of soybean biophysical variables of leaf area index, leaf chlorophyll content, canopy chlorophyll content, and equivalent leaf water thickness from proximal reflectance data integrated broadbands corresponding to moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer, thematic mapper, and linear imaging self scanning sensors through inversion of the canopy radiative transfer model, PROSAIL. Three different inversion approaches namely the look-up table, genetic algorithm, and artificial neural network were used and performances were evaluated. Application of the genetic algorithm for crop parameter retrieval is a new attempt among the variety of optimization problems in remote sensing which have been successfully demonstrated in the present study. Its performance was as good as that of the look-up table approach and the artificial neural network was a poor performer. The general order of estimation accuracy for para-meters irrespective of inversion approaches was leaf area index > canopy chlorophyll content > leaf chlorophyll content > equivalent leaf water thickness. Performance of inversion was comparable for broadband reflectances of all three sensors in the optical region with insignificant differences in estimation accuracy among them.

Effect of Coldfog on the Corona Induced Degradation of Silicone Rubber Samples

Corona is an unavoidable phenomena in high voltage power transmission system, in spite of suitably designed insulator accessories and transmission line hardware. It is a proven fact that the continuous occurrence of corona can subject the polymeric insulator to a severe degradation. Further, moisture in the air has a positive influence on the corona activity. This paper presents the methodology to evaluate the corona performance of the silicone rubber housing material with simultaneous application of cold fog. Analysis conducted after corona treatment by the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) present an interesting results showing a higher hydroxylation of sample surface under the moisture application than in the normal condition for both AC and DC excitation. FTIR spectrum also indicates the presence of nitric acid on the treated surface with coldfog application. Results obtained from SEM analysis are also presented.

Modeling of Effect of Nucleation Rate and Electrodes' Resistance on Discharge Characteristics of Lead-Acid Batteries

Classical models are not successful in describing discharge characteristics of a lead-acid battery when the current density is varied over a wide range. A model is developed in this work to overcome this lacuna by introducing into the standard models two mechanisms that have not been used earlier. Lead sulfate particles nucleate and grow on active materials of electrodes during discharge, resulting in coverage of active area. Increasing rate of discharge builds supersaturation of lead sulfate rapidly, and causes increased extents of nucleation and coverage. Electrodes behave almost like an insulator due to deposition of lead sulfate when active materials are converted to a critical extent, and this can stop discharge process. Influence of this mechanism is also rate dependent. The new model developed is tested against data on polarization behavior, and capacity drawn as a function of current. The model successfully predicts both polarization curves and Peukert behavior. The model is used to predict charge that can be drawn at a current after partial discharge at a different current. Model suggests that altering nucleation behavior can be useful in enhancing capacity available for discharge. (C) 2015 The Electrochemical Society.

Localized Excitations and the Morphology of Cooperatively Rearranging Regions in a Colloidal Glass-Forming Liquid

We develop a scheme based on a real space microscopic analysis of particle dynamics to ascertain the relevance of dynamical facilitation as a mechanism of structural relaxation in glass-forming liquids. By analyzing the spatial organization of localized excitations within clusters of mobile particles in a colloidal glass former and examining their partitioning into shell-like and corelike regions, we establish the existence of a crossover from a facilitation-dominated regime at low area fractions to a collective activated hopping-dominated one close to the glass transition. This crossover occurs in the vicinity of the area fraction at which the peak of the mobility transfer function exhibits a maximum and the morphology of cooperatively rearranging regions changes from stringlike to a compact form. Collectively, our findings suggest that dynamical facilitation is dominated by collective hopping close to the glass transition, thereby constituting a crucial step towards identifying the correct theoretical scenario for glass formation.

Gasification of wood particles in a co-current packed bed: Experiments and model analysis

This study focuses on addressing the propagation front movement in a co-current downdraft gasification system. A detailed single particle modeling analysis extended to the packed bed reactor is used to compare with the experimental measurement as well those available in the literature. This model for biomass gasification systems considered pyrolysis process, gas phase volatile combustion, and heterogeneous char reactions along with gas phase reactions in the packed bed. The pyrolysis kinetics has a critical influence on the gasification process. The propagation front has been shown to increase with air mass flux, attains a peak and then decreases with further increase in air mass flux and finally approaches negative propagation rate. This indicates that front is receding, or no upward movement() bra her it is moving downward towards the char bed. The propagation rate correlates with mass flux as (m) over dot `'(0.883) during the increasing regimes of the front movement The study clearly identifies that bed movement is an important parameter for consideration in a co-current configuration towards establishing the effective bed movement. The study also highlights the importance of surface area to volume ratio of the particles in the packed bed and its influence on the volatile generation. Finally, the gas composition for air gasification under various air mass fluxes is compared with the experimental results. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.