Assessment of Forest Encroachment in Shimoga District of Western Ghats, India, Using Remote Sensing and Gis

Sustainable management of Forest ecosystem is necessary as it serves the important functions such as supplementing human dietary requirements, ecological significance in terms of biodiversity conservation, flood control, water purifica-tion and micro climate regulation etc. Hence, an inventory of reserve forest in a given area is a pre-requisite for their con-servation and management. The present study is focused on RS and GIS based assessment of forest encroachment in Shimoga district of Karnataka for the years 1990, 2000 and 2010 using Landsat TM/MSS/ETM+ for 1990 and 2000, and IRS P6 LISS III for the year 2010. It’s located in the mid south western part of malnad region of Karnataka state, geographically lies between 13°27' and 14°39' N latitudes and 74°38' and 76°4'E longitudes. It covers an area of 8,482.32 km2 a apart of western ghats areas (Sahayadrihill ranges), the densely forested high hilly Malnad in the west and sparsely forested tablelands semi-malnad in the east of Karnataka state with a forest area constituting 32.66% of the total geographical area of the district. The study revealed that the encroachment in reserve forest area accounts for 282.92 km2, 257.27 km2 and 192.43 km2 for the year 2010, 2000 and 1990 respectively. Extension of cultivation is the major cause of large-scale encroachment in the district. There is no proper demarcation of the forest boundaries in some places. This has also resulted in encroachment of for-est land. It has led to forest fragmentation, loss of habitat and corridor for movement of wild animals, etc. The policy mak-ers and judiciary have stressed the need for use of recent satellite data to assess the forest encroachment in Western Ghats region. In this regard, an attempt has been made to study the two decadal forest encroachment patterns of Shimoga district. The extent of encroachment was observed to be 12.13 % in 2010. Encroachment is more prevalent in the moist and dry deciduous forests than the evergreen forests and is seen increasing day by day. This information will help for frontline forest officials to trace and book forest offences occurring in their jurisdiction and also to prevent encroachments

Remunerativeness led acreage response of arecanut in Karnataka state

The decision of farmers regarding allocation of farm resources, in general, and land resource which have supply inelasticity is crucial. This decision of farmers in case of commercial plantation crops will be highly influenced by the policies and programmes formulated by the government. The formulated developmental programmes mainly aim at increasing the overall production of the economy and its success depends on the reactions of farmers to such programmes. The increased production can be achieved either through extensive or intensive cultivation or the mix of two. In this context it becomes imperative to have a better insight about the farmers’ response to various price and non-price factors. To understand the behavioural mechanism of arecanut growers in major areca growing districts of Karnataka, Nerlovian lagged adjustment model was employed. The result revealed that it is the expected price (remunerativeness) which has resulted in extensive cultivation in most of the areca growing belts. The result was contrasting in case of Dakshina Kannada where the response of farmers to expected price was negative, which might be due to the fact that growers in this region have shifted to alternative crop i.e., rubber, which is equally remunerative due to wide prevalence of yellow leaf disease. The other likely reason would be the limitation of area for further expansion, since area expansion has met its saturation in the locality. To prove the remunerativeness of arecanut enterprise, representative district Shimoga was chosen. The economics of arecanut cultivation revealed that it is remunerative compared to other major crops of the study area

Assessment of Forest Encroachment at Belgaum District of Western Ghats of Karnataka Using Remote Sensing and GIS

The present study focuses on the assessment of forest encroachment in Belgaum district of Karnataka for the year 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2010 using RS and GIS. The study area is located in the north-western part of Karnataka state, with a total area of 13,415 km2.The study revealed that the forest encroachment is 4245.6, 16133.1, 28304.4 and 29010.0 ha for the year 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2010 respectively. The extent of encroachment in 2010 amounted to 9.66 % in evergreen to semi evergreen, 15.84 % moist deciduous and 74.50 % in scrub forests.The highest percentage of encroachment was in Hukkeri taluk with mixed plantation and the major part was scrubland whose average encroached area was 31.38% over the years. The major factors accelerating encroachments were agricultural expansion, population dependency on forest livelihood, limited land for cultivation, lack of grazing land and poverty

Reduction of Large Seismic Deformations using Elasto-plastic Passive Energy Dissipaters

The design of supporting systems for pipelines carrying highly toxic or radioactive liquids at very high temperature, is an important issue in the safety aspect for a nuclear power installation. These pipeline systems are normally designed to be held rigid by conventional snubber supports for protection from earthquake. The pipeline system design must balance the seismic deformations and other deformations due to thermal effect. A rigid pipeline system using conventional snubber supports always leads to an increase in thermal stresses, hence a rational seismic design for pipeline supporting systems becomes essential. Contrary to this rigid design, it is possible to design a flexible pipeline system and to decrease the seismic response by increasing the damping using passive energy absorbing (PEA) element, which dissipates vibration energy. An X-shaped or a hourglass-shaped metal element is a classic example of elasto-plastic passive energy absorber of metallic yielding type. The inherent ductile property of metals like steel, which undergoes stable energy dissipation in the plastic region, is made use of in achieving energy loss. This paper presents the experimental and analytical studies carried out on yielding-type elasto-plastic PEA elements to be used in a passive energy dissipating device for the control of large seismic deformations of pipelines subjected to earthquake loading

Visible Sector Supersymmetry Breaking Revisited

We revisit the possibility of "visible sector" SUSY models: models which are straightforward renormalizable extensions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), where SUSY is broken at tree level. Models of this type were abandoned twenty years ago due to phenomenological problems, which we review. We then demonstrate that it is possible to construct simple phenomenologically viable visible sector SUSY models. Such models are indeed very constrained, and have some inelegant features. They also have interesting and distinctive phenomenology. Our models predict light gauginos and very heavy squarks and sleptons. The squarks and sleptons may not be observable at the LHC. The LSP is a stable very light gravitino with a significant Higgsino admixture. The NLSP is mostly Bino. The Higgs boson is naturally heavy. Proton decay is sufficently and naturally suppressed, even for a cutoff scale as low as 10^8 GeV. The lightest particle of the O'Raifeartaigh sector (the LOP) is stable, and is an interesting cold dark matter candidate.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, LaTe

Ab initio Quantum and ab initio Molecular Dynamics of the Dissociative Adsorption of Hydrogen on Pd(100)

The dissociative adsorption of hydrogen on Pd(100) has been studied by ab initio quantum dynamics and ab initio molecular dynamics calculations. Treating all hydrogen degrees of freedom as dynamical coordinates implies a high dimensionality and requires statistical averages over thousands of trajectories. An efficient and accurate treatment of such extensive statistics is achieved in two steps: In a first step we evaluate the ab initio potential energy surface (PES) and determine an analytical representation. Then, in an independent second step dynamical calculations are performed on the analytical representation of the PES. Thus the dissociation dynamics is investigated without any crucial assumption except for the Born-Oppenheimer approximation which is anyhow employed when density-functional theory calculations are performed. The ab initio molecular dynamics is compared to detailed quantum dynamical calculations on exactly the same ab initio PES. The occurence of quantum oscillations in the sticking probability as a function of kinetic energy is addressed. They turn out to be very sensitive to the symmetry of the initial conditions. At low kinetic energies sticking is dominated by the steering effect which is illustrated using classical trajectories. The steering effects depends on the kinetic energy, but not on the mass of the molecules. Zero-point effects lead to strong differences between quantum and classical calculations of the sticking probability. The dependence of the sticking probability on the angle of incidence is analysed; it is found to be in good agreement with experimental data. The results show that the determination of the potential energy surface combined with high-dimensional dynamical calculations, in which all relevant degrees of freedon are taken into account, leads to a detailed understanding of the dissociation dynamics of hydrogen at a transition metal surface.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, subm. to Phys. Rev.

A preferential attachment model with random initial degrees

In this paper, a random graph process ${G(t)}_{t\geq 1}$ is studied and its degree sequence is analyzed. Let $(W_t)_{t\geq 1}$ be an i.i.d. sequence. The graph process is defined so that, at each integer time $t$, a new vertex, with $W_t$ edges attached to it, is added to the graph. The new edges added at time t are then preferentially connected to older vertices, i.e., conditionally on $G(t-1)$, the probability that a given edge is connected to vertex i is proportional to $d_i(t-1)+\delta$, where $d_i(t-1)$ is the degree of vertex $i$ at time $t-1$, independently of the other edges. The main result is that the asymptotical degree sequence for this process is a power law with exponent $\tau=\min\{\tau_{W}, \tau_{P}\}$, where $\tau_{W}$ is the power-law exponent of the initial degrees $(W_t)_{t\geq 1}$ and $\tau_{P}$ the exponent predicted by pure preferential attachment. This result extends previous work by Cooper and Frieze, which is surveyed.Comment: In the published form of the paper, the proof of Proposition 2.1 is incomplete. This version contains the complete proo