Ravinder Singh Bhalla

Invasive trees in catchments around the world are a source of concern due to their hydrological and ecological impacts. A large number of studies have focused on their impact on dry-season stream discharge due to enhanced transpiration. The impact of invasive trees on stream discharge and flood risk during extreme rain events, which are becoming mo...

We worked with artisanal fisherfolk along the Coromandel coast in two districts of Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Pondicherry in South India to map and quantify catch, gear and crew details for all fishing craft along 120 km. Spatially explicit fisheries data were collected to understand the distribution of fishing effort and to identify hig...

Observations of craft as point locations with attributes collected during boat and crew surveys and shortest distance to the shoreline. (CSV)

Interactive map of kernel density estimates and location of all craft and mesh size classes of gear they operate. (HTML)

Interactive map of kernel density estimates and location of different craft classes and mesh sizes of gear they operate. (HTML)

Fishing craft found along the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu. (a) A traditional Kattumaram, (b) a Kattumaram fitted with an outboard engine, (c) a small and (d) large fibre reinforced plastic boats. (e) trawler, (f) Vallam. (TIF)

Code and code-documentation with datasets. (ZIP)

Interactive map of kernel density estimates and location of type of gear and mesh sizes of gear they operate. (HTML)

Interactive map of kernel density estimates and location of craft type and mesh sizes of gear they operate. (HTML)

Description of attributes in the GIS layer and CSV file. (CSV)

Industrial and urban development along the coast may exacerbate the changes induced by oceano-climatic processes to such an extent that the coast becomes uninhabitable. This paper presents a baseline study carried out on the 360 km long Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu's (TN) Bay of Bengal coast, Southeast India. About 30% of the 72 million inhabitan...

Industrial and urban development along the coast may exacerbate the changes induced by oceano-climatic processes to such an extent that the coast becomes uninhabitable. This paper presents a baseline study carried out on the 360 km-long Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu's (TN) Bay of Bengal coast, Southeast India. About 30% of the 72 million inhabitan...

This is the final technical report written as a part of the Changing Water Cycle programme funded by UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and India's Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), under the project titled “Hydrologic and carbon services in the Western Ghats: Response of forests and agro-ecosystems to extreme rainfall events”

The relative impacts of hunting and habitat on waterbird community were studied in agricultural wetlands of southern India. We surveyed wetlands to document waterbird community, and interviewed hunters to document hunting intensity, targeted species, and the motivations for hunting. Our results show that hunting leads to drastic declines in waterbi...

Click on the link for the entire article (and the rest of the special issue) : https://espacepolitique.revues.org/3805 In 2010, a collective of 8 geographers and sociologists launched the research program “Informality, Power and the Other Side of Urban Spaces - Inverses”. This text is a description of the process and different stages followed by t...

Large scale changes in land cover can impact a range of ecosystem services, particularly in the context of global climate change induced extreme rain events coupled with longer dry seasons. A recent Landsat image was classified using over 400 ground control points and Maximum Likelihood Classification to obtain a map of the present extent of six cl...

The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) are widely recognized as major drivers of inter-annual variability of the Indian monsoon (IM) and extreme rainfall events (EREs). We assess the time-varying strength and non-linearity of these linkages using dynamic linear regression and Generalized Additive Models. Our resul...

Watershed development (WSD) is an important and expensive rural development initiative in India. Proponents of the approach contend that treating watersheds will increase agricultural and overall biomass productivity, which in turn will reduce rural poverty. We used satellite-measured normalized differenced vegetation index as a proxy for land prod...

Communities in North Eastern Kenya find themselves being constantly affected by recurring droughts. The frequency of droughts in the region has exacerbated existing socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities. This is due to the fact that communities have not been able to recover from drought emergencies in time before the next drought strikes...

This document attempts to provide a strategy for Save the Children to develop a long term programme on community based watershed restoration. The justification for this is provided through another document entitled “Integrated Watershed Approaches to Mitigate Slow Onset of Droughts” which comprises the first part of this study. By extending their p...

his paper is part of study commissioned by Save the Children Somalia/Somaliland to explore watershed restoration as a means of disaster mitigation and disaster proofing. The document reviews publications and studies in the Horn of Africa and adjacent regions to cover work on watershed development as a strategy for disaster proofing and risk reducti...

We analyse the suitability of Government of India’s 2003 and 2008 common guidelines for prioritising micro-watersheds for restoration. These guidelines attempt to balance the need for improved hydraulic function with poverty alleviation and agricultural productivity. To do so, they provide a set of sub-criteria for prioritising micro-watersheds for...

Das and Vincent (1) conclude that mangroves reduced the death toll from storm surge in the Orissa Super Cyclone. However, it is unclear from their analyses whether or not this effect occurs independently over and above that of other variables known to affect inundation by long-period waves, such as distance from the coast and topography (2). Furthe...

This paper describes how remote sensing techniques were used to study the effect of mangroves and other woody coastal vegetation as a protective measure against the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Remote sensing made it possible to compare pre- and post-Tsunami images of large areas. A study site was selected based on medium resolution Landsat imagery a...

This document presents the restoration strategy that was adopted for the restoration component of the PTEI (Phase II) and some of the major achivements are: 1. Identification of representative habitats along the Coromandel coast using imageries and following up with extensive field visits and ecological assessments of their status. 2. Sites selecte...

Significant increase in the growth of paddy plant parts was achieved by halving the urea used and pelleting the remaining with neem cake prior to application. Results on a non-averaged dataset showed significant increase in leaf length, number of leaves, number of panicles, number of tillers and greenness of leaves. Averaged data showed similar res...

In a recent paper in the International Journal of Remote Sensing, Olwig et al. (2007) present a detailed, GIS-based description of the spatial distribution of damage from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami relative to coastal vegetation in Tamil Nadu, India, and conclude that “... mangrove forests and coastal shelterbelts provided protection from the [t...

Conversion of coastal sand dunes to plantations has intensified dramatically after the tsunami of December 2004, driven largely by the belief that bio-shields miti- gated tsunami inundation. This assumption was tested using field-based mapping and remote sensing. A re- gression between the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and inundation dista...