Raman Nautiyal

Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) | ICFRE

Wetlands are important ecosystems, and few of them, owing to unique characteristics, have been designated the status of Ramsar sites under the convention of wetlands. Despite the status, few of these wetlands are under threat owing to their social importance. Renuka wetland is one such important Ramsar site in India, which is culturally an embodime...

Grevillea robusta (Silver Oak) is an evergreen tree valued for its eco-protection and commercial attributes in its native region. The species was introduced in Africa and the Indian subcontinent to reap similar benefits. In the present study, tree stands of G. robusta were selected and grouped into three DBH classes, to record phenological events a...

Kaur et al. (2000) suggested an optimal allocation model for symmetric distribution in ranked set sampling (RSS). This model is not much applicable due to its dependency upon extreme or mid order statistic only. In this paper, an attempt to make a “favourable” and near optimal allocation has been made by allocating each rank order at least once and...

Unlabelled: Melampsora medusae f. sp. deltoidae is causing serious foliar rust disease on Populus deltoides clones in India. In the present study, a novel fungal hyperparasite on M. medusae has been reported. The hyperparasitic fungus was isolated from the uredeniospores of the rust fungi and identified as Cladosporium oxysporum by morphological c...

Assessment of the vulnerability of a watershed to soil erosion is essential for developing management strategies for a watershed. Different approaches are in practice to assess soil erosion vulnerability but lack of data and accessibility of the watersheds in rugged mountainous terrain puts restrictions on using quantitative techniques to assess vu...

Watersheds in the Lesser Himalayan region are highly susceptible to natural hazards, particularly those instigated by action and movement of water, such as soil erosion, flood, and mass movements of lands. Hilly watersheds with diversified land use and fragile ecosystems are responsible for accelerating soil erosion. Soil erosion is one of the most...

Few studies are found in literature on estimation of population quantiles using the method of ranked set sampling (RSS). The optimal RSS strategy is to select observations with at most two fixed rank order statistics from different ranked sets. In this paper, a near optimal unbalanced RSS model for estimating pth (0 < p < 1) population quantile is...

Ranked Set Sampling (RSS) is a sampling strategy which is advantageous when measurement of sampling units is very difficult but when small sets of units can be ranked according to other methods that do not require actual measurements. The units corresponding to each rank are used in RSS and RSS performs better than simple random sampling (SRS) when...

Hydroxypropyl guar is one of the industrially significant biopolymers. In the present study, hydroxypropylation of guar gum was investigated using Taguchi's L9 orthogonal array design of experiment. Reaction conditions were optimized to obtain higher hydroxypropyl content (%) in the derivatized sample. The optimized conditions comprised 7 mL and 0....

During the COVID-19 pandemic, testing of all persons except those who are symptomatic, is not feasible due to shortage of facilities and staff. This article focuses on estimating the number of COVID-19-positive persons over a geographical domain. The Horvitz-Thompson and Hansen-Hurwitz type estimators under adaptive cluster sampling-based design ha...

Seasonal variations affect the rate of biomass accumulation in plants which is internally governed by biochemical metabolites. Studying the impact of atmospheric seasonal changes on biochemical parameters can improve our understanding of various plant species' physiological plasticity. Bamboos are a fast-growing group of woody grass species, widely...

Soil erosion is one of the most critical hazards adversely affecting both environment and economy. Assessment of the annual soil erosion rate provides information on soil erosion risk zones indicating the areas with high, severe and low risks. Modelling and prediction of soil erosion has a long history of more than seven decades. It becomes imperat...

Wetlands are very important ecosystems from the ecological, productivity and conservation perspective. Economic valuation of ecosystem services provided by wetlandsquantifies the various benefits derived from wetlands and puts a value on their conservation. One such wetland of importance is the Renuka wetland, which is a natural wetland located in...

Water induced soil erosion has always been a matter of concern in watersheds as they increase the soil vulnerability towards erosion. If unchecked, the eroded material reduces the capability of the river to carry the adequate amount of water and increase the amount of sediments in the watershed area. Determining vulnerability of soil to erosion pla...

The Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) is an ecologically important region of the Indian subcontinent, where anthropogenic habitat loss and forest fragmentation are major issues. The most prominent threat is forest fires because of their impacts on the microhabitat and macrohabitat characteristics and the resulting disruption of ecological processes. Moreov...

Quaternised polysaccharides have diverse applications due to introduction of quaternary ammonium groups in the biopolymer. In the present study, quaternization of guar gum was carried out by adopting the Taguchi’s approach of robust design of experiments for optimizing the levels of the factors to obtain quaternized guar gum with higher DS. The met...

The present study has been carried out to investigate the rheological and spectral data of galactomannan and its quaternary ammonium derivative obtained from the endosperm of Cassia tora Linn. seed. The characterization of native and quaternized Cassia tora gum (CTG) was done by employing 2D NMR spectroscopy including HSQC and HMBC spectra. The dat...

This book presents recent developments in statistical methodologies with particular relevance to applications in forestry and environmental sciences. It discusses important methodologies like ranked set sampling, adaptive cluster sampling, small area estimation, calibration approach-based estimators, design of experiments, multivariate techniques,...

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature alter gene-expression arrays commensurate with physio-morphological changes, resulting in issues of adaptation, growth patterns, and productivity of terrestrial vegetation. An experiment was conducted to investigate the adaptive response of Populus deltoides clone G48 to the combined effect of...

Galactomannans are branched natural biopolymers possessing good biocompatibility, biodegradability and sustainability leading to diverse industrial applications. In the present study, quaternization of galactomannan derived from Cassia tora gum was investigated by adopting Taguchi's approach of robust design of experiments using 3-chloro-2-hydroxyp...

The genus Eucalyptus occurs in a wide range of environmental conditions, including rainforests, subalpine, arid/semi-arid and moist temperate zones. It includes species with the capacity to cope with extremely low water potential. This study aims to screen water stress tolerance in two Eucalyptus species under nursery conditions. Inter-specific var...

Industrialization and globalization have resulted in pollution of all the three ecosystems, including soil, water, and air. Among these, air pollution has generated much interest, since it has a major influence on the transboundary dispersion of pollutants globally. Air pollution tolerance index (APTI) value represents tolerance level of plants whi...

Periodic forest fire in the Pine zone of Indian Himalayas has been portrayed as the great destroyer of forests. The coniferous forests in the Himalayan region, notably Pinus roxburghii stands are highly prone to fire. The lack of proper forest fire monitoring system in Pine zone is a major management issue needs attention for the long term viabilit...

Ranked Set Sampling (RSS) is a sampling scheme, which is mainly used under the condition that the measurement of units are difficult or time consuming but the ranking of the units by some methods other than actual measurements (e.g. visual inspection) is relatively easy. This paper provides a critical review of the major developments and issues in...

The estimation problem on sparsely distributed populations using adaptive cluster sampling (ACS) is discussed. In the first phase of ACS, two stage sampling is used in which primary and secondary sampling units are selected using simple random sampling without replacement. The idea of Thompson (1996) is introduced in order to choose an appropriate...

Winter cherry or Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) is an important medicinal plant used in traditional and herbal medicine system. Yet, there is no information available on response of this plant to changing climatic conditions particularly elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Therefore, we conducted an experiment to examine the effect of elevat...

Winter cherry or Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) is an important medicinal plant used in traditional and herbal medicine system. Yet, there is no information available on response of this plant to changing climatic conditions particularly elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Therefore, we conducted an experiment to examine the effect of elevat...

The problem of estimation is motivated by some studies from the area of developmental programs management to be implemented by the government and non-government organizations under different phases. The examples of such programs are educational programs, women empowerment programs for enhancing gross enrollment ratio in a region. There are two impo...

Atmospheric particulate matter is a mixture of diverse elements which are emitted out of motor vehicles. These affect the overall growth and development of plants according to their physical and chemical nature and are one of the major culprits for stress induced changes in plants. Surface dust deposit may alter the optical properties of leaves, pa...

Environmental compensation measures usually accompany energy projects. Willingness- To-Pay (WTP) for five intangible benefits derived from afforested areas of a compensatory afforestation programme of National Thermal Power Corporation Dadri are estimated. Conventional Contingent Valuation shows the average WTP € 2.1 per respondent per month with m...

In situations where sampling units in a study can be more easily ranked than quantified ranked set sampling provides the unbiased estimator of population mean with smaller variance compared to the simple random sampling (SRS) of the same sample size. Further, in many environmental and forestry situations, the data obtained from the site generally f...

Role of applied Statistics in Forestry research is very crucial starting from the data collection, drawn inferences to the conclusion and interpretation of the valid results of specified objective under procedurally and economically optimized way. In forestry science, forest biometry has a pervasive influence in the development and application of s...

At the interface of reducing agricultural income and increasing unemployment in agrarian economy of rural India, this article summarizes and evaluates the state of mulberry sericulture in northwest India, which includes Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh. In plan period (2007-2012), there was an addition of 6 196 ha...

The collection, processing and dissemination of statistics pertaining to the forestry sector in India have become a major cause of concern for policy planners and researchers. The status of estimates related to various parameters of the forestry and logging sector in the country is not up to the mark. Inordinate delay in data availability, difficul...

Casuarina equisetifolia is a multipurpose tree species, which is salt tolerant and is recommended for plantations in saline and coastal areas. Clonal propagation is an important component of tree improvement programmes for this species. Eight batches of C-equisetifolia from a single clone, comprise 20 cuttings each, were rooted in vermiculate media...