What is the problem with Bangalore lakes?

Distribution of Hand Sanitizers

Hand sanitizers were made by the ATREE CERC team and were distributed to district collectorate in Alappuzha, Kerala. A total of 200 bottles of sanitizer were made by our team and distributed on 27th March, 2020. 

Interventions by ATREE CERC in Muhamma
amidst the pandemic

To become self-sufficient and ensure food security in a lockdown crisis such as this, the best idea is to give more importance to our traditional local and seasonal crops in order to get a steady supply of food while maintaining diversity and balance of the system. Keeping this in mind, ATREE Community Environmental Research Centre (CERC) has intervened in Muhamma with a small step to ensure food security and livelihood to people. Traditional tuber crops like yam and colocasia were brought back to the homesteads and also planted in the available spaces in the area which otherwise would remain fallow. 

Mask Making at ATREE CERC

The social innovation lab members of ATREE CERC with the support of Antrix Corporation has been engaged in mask making process and its distribution during the Covid time. With the scarcity of masks, the authorities of Muhamma village in Alappuzha has been approaching various resources to meet their requirements. This creates a great involvement from the community women who are the part of social innovation lab at Atree Cerc and engaged in mask making process by opening one of the member’s tailor shop and collecting cotton piece cloth. With the two-layer fine quality masks in different colours, this group of five women distributed nearly 3000 masks in the Primary health centre staffs, hospitals, Muhamma panchayat and Police station.  

Action Research and Policy Support on Community Forest Resource

 ATREE’s F&G programme has been involved in a project on “Action Research and Policy Support on Community Forest Resource (CFR) management in Central India” since 2016 under the leadership of Dr. Sharachchandra Lele. A template developed by ATREE and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) was accepted by the Government of Maharashtra as a guideline for CFR management planning. 
Recently, Shruti Mokashi and Atul Joshi, post-doctoral researchers in this project, were invited by SRISHTI, a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) working in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, to conduct training regarding how to initiate CFR management planning using this guideline. SRISHTI team has already begun to use their new skills to map CFR boundaries in many villages in Gadchiroli, as a first step in CFR management planning.
ATREE team has also been invited by the Collector of Dhamtari District in Chhattisgarh to support CFR management planning in their district.   

Issues & potential solutions for water & food security

A new review article was published by Rai S. Kookana, Pay Drechsel, Joanne Vanderzalm and ATREE's Priyanka Jamwal in Science of The Total Environment journal.
Urbanisation will be one of the 21st century's most transformative trends. By 2050, it will increase from 55% to 68%, more than doubling the urban population in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Urbanisation has multifarious (positive as well as negative) impacts on the wellbeing of humans and the environment. The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) form the blueprint to achieve a sustainable future for all. Clean Water and Sanitation is a specific goal (SDG 6) within the suite of 17 interconnected goals. 
Find the link for the article here

Occurence of Honey Badgers in northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh

A new paper was published titled 'On the occurrence of Honey Badger Mellivora capensis (Mammalia: Carnivora: Mustelidae) in the northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh, India' was published by ATREE's Vikram Aditya, Yogesh Pasul and Ganesh Thyagarajan in The Journal of Threatened Taxa.
The Honey Badger or Ratel is a monotypic species of the badger family Mustelidae ranging across Africa and Asia at low densities. There have been no records of their presence and distribution across the Eastern Ghats of India. The present note reports the first camera trap record of the Honey Badger Mellivora capensis Schreber, 1776 from the reserved forests of the northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh, India.
Find the link for the paper here

Implications for Restoration

A new paper was published in the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society Journal by Kartik Shanker and ATREE's Vidyadhar Atkore, Nachiket Kelkar, Shrinivas Badiger, Jagdish Krishnaswamy. The paper titled 'Multiscale Investigation of Water Chemistry Effects on Fish Guild Species Richness in Regulated and Nonregulated Rivers of India's Western Ghats: Implications for Restoration' delves into tropical rivers across the world that are experiencing rapid degradation and loss of fish species due to flow regulation, pollution, and other anthropogenic pressures. Knowledge of how flow alterations at different scales affect tropical fish diversity remains limited, especially in terms of how resulting changes in water chemistry affect fish communities. We investigated fish guild composition and responses of guild richness to water chemistry in 120 river segments with and without local‐scale water removals and pollution. This included two regulated subbasins (with flow regulation by barrages and large‐scale water diversions) and two nonregulated subbasins (flows not regulated by these barriers) in India's Western Ghats.
Find the link for the paper here

Evaluating Landscape Permeability

A new article was published in the journal of Biological Conservation by Anisha Jayadevan, Rajat Nayak, Krithi K.Karanth, Jagdish Krishnaswamy, Ruth DeFries, K.Ullas Karanth and Srinivas Vaidyanathan. The article titled 'Navigating paved paradise: Evaluating landscape permeability to movement for large mammals in two conservation priority landscapes in India' discusses the loss of habitat and biodiversity due to extravagant human land use and activities, causing the altering of animal movement through landscapes. The landscape permeability to movement in two conservation priority landscapes in India, the Western Ghats (WG) and Central India (CI) is evaluated by studying the simulated movement and dispersal of wide-ranging species. The resulting outcomes suggest that a large percentage of the landscape crucial for maintaining movement is not completely permeable. Such areas are often neglected in conservation planning. Spatially explicit information on where animal movement is affected at large spatial scales is crucial for prioritizing conservation efforts. This approach can be used for other landscapes where data on large mammal movement is lacking.
Find the link for the article here

Peer Review of Wildlife Conservation Plan in Dibang Valley

The new peer review titled "‘The devil is in the detail’: Peer-review of the Wildlife Conservation Plan by the Wildlife Institute of India for the Etalin Hydro power Project, Dibang Valley" was published in the Zoo's Print journal.
A group of Indian scientists from diverse disciplines, many with research experience in northeastern India, including the Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh conducted a peer-review of the Technical Report prepared by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). The Technical Report concerned with the Wildlife Conservation plan for the impact zone of Etalin HEP project. It was prepared in response to the Forest Advisory Committee’s (FAC) recommendation to conduct "a multiple season replicate study on biodiversity assessment of 3097 MW Etalin Hydroelectric project in Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh.
The contributors to the peer review are Chintan Sheth, M. Firoz Ahmed, Sayan Banerjee, Neelesh Dahanukar, Shashank Dalvi, Aparajita Datta, Anirban Datta Roy, Khyanjeet Gogoi, Monsoonjyoti Gogoi, Shantanu Joshi, Arjun Kamdar, Jagdish Krishnaswamy, Manish Kumar, Rohan K. Menzies, Sanjay Molur, Shomita Mukherjee, Rohit Naniwadekar, Sahil Nijhawan, Rajeev Raghavan, Megha Rao, Jayanta Kumar Roy, Narayan Sharma, Anindya Sinha, Umesh Srinivasan, Krishnapriya Tamma, Chihi Umbrey, Nandini Velho, Ashwin Viswanathan & Rameshori Yumnam.
Download the full pdf here

Panel discussions on the pandemic's impact on Bangalore

Dr. Veena Srinivasan, Director Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation, ATREE, has recently been part of two webinars on discussions related to the pandemic, its impact on the city of Bangalore and how we can reshape the role that we as citizens can play.
The webinar titled "Keep the Change: Can Bengaluru sustain the lessons of the pandemic" organised by Bangalore International Centre on the 30th of April was a panel discussion involving Nitin Pai, Veena Srinivasan, Manu Chandra, Tara Chacko and Ravichandar moderated by Rohini Nilekani. 
Watch the entire panel discussion here
The webinar titled "Pandemic impact on NGOs" organised by Bengaluru Sustainibility Forum on the 27th of May was a panel discussion involving Veena Srinivasan, Avinash Krishnamurthy, Divya Tiwari and Suresh KT.

Bridging the science-policy-practice gap

IHE Delft organised its 6th international symposium 'From Capacity Development to Implementation Science' on May 26-29, 2020,on knowledge and capacity development for the water sector.The symposium called attention to the strategic importance of knowledge and institutional capacity for policy, operational practice and education. This is urgently needed to address the current and growing challenges in water management for a sustainable, secure, just and equitable world. It was an online event.
Dr. Veena Srinivasan, Director Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation, ATREE was one of the keynote speakers for the webinar on day 3. As part of Plenary 3 titled 'Managing Change and Transition', she discussed "Bridging the science-policy-practice gap" by illustrating the case study of the Cauvery Delta in peninsular India.
Watch the complete keynote presentation Here.