Feature Article

Book Review - Biodiversity of Sikkim: Exploring and Conserving a Global Hotspot. M. L.Arrawatia and Sandeep Tambe (eds).

Nature-based tourism has the potential to enhance global biodiversity conservation by providing alternative livelihood strategies for local people, which may alleviate poverty in and around protected areas. Despite the popularity of the concept of nature-based tourism as an integrated conservation and development tool, empirical research on its actual socioeconomic benefits, on the distributional pattern of these benefits, and on its direct driving factors is lacking, because relevant long-term data are rarely available.

Avian mortality at communication towers in the continental United States and Canada is an issue of pressing conservation concern. Previous estimates of this mortality have been based on limited data and have not included Canada. We compiled a database of communication towers in the continental United States and Canada and estimated avian mortality by tower with a regression relating avian mortality to tower height.

The earthquake and tsunami of 2004 resulted in the devastation of marine and coastal ecosystems across the Indian Ocean. However, without adequate baseline information it has been difficult to properly gauge its full impact. The reefs of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal lie on a path that ranges from 190 to 500 km from Banda Aceh, the epicentre of the 2004 tsunami. In 2008, we recorded benthic damage as a result of the tsunami to reefs off 14 Nicobar Islands across a gradient of distance from the epicentre.

Pollen record of an AMS radiocarbon dated lacustrine sediment profile underlying the Chandra peat deposit in Himachal Pradesh, yielded signatures of the globally reported Younger Dryas (YD) cold event. This report of the YD event in NW Himalaya, substantiated by mineral magnetic variations, also records significant wet and warm conditions prior to 12,880 cal yrs BP, depicting the Ållerød interstadial preceding YD.

We have utilized satellite images of 1975 and 2001 to reveal the slow response of glaciers to climatic warming in the Great Himalayan Range, Jammu and Kashmir, India. Correlation of various glacier morphometric parameters with reference to glacier area change and shift in the snout position revealed that morphometric parameters exert prime control on area changes over glaciers, but do not have much control on the snout retreat or advancement of glaciers. The

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing offers new and improved capabilities for vertical and structural characterization of objects, such as plant height and different growth stages/strata, etc. Climate change will change tree and plant growth conditions and thus will change forest structure and distribution, which can potentially be studied using LiDAR remote sensing.

Human-driven land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) is one of the most important causes for depletion of biodiversity. Few studies have been undertaken to spatially identify the natural areas prone to LULCC and hence biodiversity loss. This article describes a geospatial modelling technique using a combination of drivers of LULCC, spatial distribution
of LULCC and topographic impedances for change in hotspot. A study has been carried out to establish the model. The model has shown that the natural areas having high population density in the vicinity are highly prone to LULCC.

We study the regional variation of temperature trends (warming or cooling) over Western India and the contribution of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes towards this warming or cooling based on temperature datasets of 37 years (1973–2009). The contribution of LULC to the warming or cooling is estimated based on deviation in temperature in the observation and reanalysis datasets. The observed temperature dataset indicates that Western India is getting warmer by 0.13°C per decade. This warming is the combined effect of increase in concentration of greenhouse gases and LULC changes.