Project lifescape: 1. An invitation

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Life: complexity and diversity- 2. The expanding biosphere

Early life on earth arose in an environment without oxygen. In an atmosphere with increasing oxygen concentrations, co-operation among teams of biomolecules led to the emergence of multicellular organisms which over time evolved to give rise to higher plants and animals

Life: complexity and diversity- 6. Whither diversity

The evolutionary history of life is one of continual expansion, of coming into being of increasingly greater diversity of more complex organisms, colonising ever newer environmental regimes. It is a cosmic drama that has become ever more elaborate, as it retires some, but inducts an even larger number of increasingly sophisticated actors into its fold. But the process has by no means been monotonic. It is as if the stage is cleared from time to time to make for fresh beginnings, with major bouts of extinction. Humans are amongst the most complex products of evolution having in turn populated the world with ever growing numbers of complex artefacts. These artefacts are now threatening to overwhelm the diversity of life. But humans may one day engineer life capable of surviving in outer space, and thereby trigger off a new phase of expansion and diversification of living organisms

Life: complexity and diversity- 5. Distribution of diversity

Diversity of life is unevenly distributed over the surface of the earth; especially rich are the tropics, mountainous regions and island archipelagos. Lying at the trijunction of Africa, temperate Eurasia and tropical Southeast Asia and enjoying a great diversity of environmental regimes, India ranks about the 10th amongst nations in terms of its diversity of species

Evolution of social behavior through interpopulation selection

Under certain special conditions natural selection can be effective at the level of local populations, or demes. Such interpopulation selection will favor genotypes that reduce the probability of extinction of their parent population even at the cost of a lowered inclusive fitness. Such genotypes may be characterized by altruistic traits only in a viscous population, i.e., in a population in which neighbors tend to be closely related. In a non-viscous population the interpopulation selection will instead favor spiteful traits when the populations are susceptible to extinction through the overutilization of the habitat, and cooperative traits when it is the newly established populations that are in the greatest danger of extinction

Adaptive significance of the relation between root and shoot growth

The partitioning of dry matter between the root and shoot tissues of a plant is regulated piecisely at a constant value for a given genotype under specified enviionmental conditions. But individuals of different species or of the same species under different enviionmental conditions show characteristic variation in the root-to-shoot ratio. We postulate that this latio is ultimately regulated not by competition between root and shoot of a plant, but by considerations maintenance of a proper balance between the functions of root and shoot of an integrated whole plant such that the net carbon fixation by the plant is maximised. A theoretical analysis of this problem shows that under certain conditions the root-to-shoot ratio would be expected to decrease for plants growing under better lighted or more arid conditions, in contradiction to the usually observed and expected trends. A simple mathematical model of the phenomenon is presented which delineates the critical parameters of the system and generates several testable predictions. For example, it is predicted that if the root-to-shoot ratio increases under conditions of greater availability of light, then the cost of maintenance and replacement of unit shoot tissue will be smaller than that for root tissue

Current status and management of scientific information relating to Indian environment

To address the important challenge of taking good care of India’s environment, we require substantial, good quality, and reliable information. Unfortunately, such information is in very short supply. Most of it is collected through the state machinery. With a few notable exceptions like India Meteorological Department and the Indian Space Research Organization, the agencies involved exhibit a number of shortcomings. These include: (1) Failure to maintain records, (2) Very patchy, incomplete information, (3) Suppression of accurate information, (4) Deliberately falsified information, (5) Failure to make information publicly available, and (6) Failure to involve public in generating useful information. Three significant avenues for involving the public in generating useful environmental information, namely, preparation of ward-wise Environmental Status Reports by Local Bodies under the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, preparation of People’s Biodiversity Registers by Local Bodies under Biological Diversity Act, and compilation of information generated through student projects under educational system-wide compulsory Environmental Education courses are being scarcely tapped. To address this challenge, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEF&CC) established around 1983 an Environmental Information System whose 68 centers focus on newsletters, research papers, court orders, etc. and little on useable environmental databases. In view of this inadequacy MOEF & CC started a new environmental information facility called the Environmental Information Centre in 2002. Regretfully EIC has altogether stopped functioning around 2010. Evidently, the prevalent exclusionary culture of bureaucratic management of information cannot be maintained in the modern, open democratic society of India. In response, the Government has promulgated the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy and set up a Nataional Spatial Data Infrastructure. This ought to lead to a sustained effort to geocode environmental information and make it available as GIS ready datasets. To this end, we need to start a fresh initiative to create a new Environment Infromation Infrastructure that can act as an umbrella platform to collate and disseminate environmental information in the country . We must also strive towards creating partnerships with public sector and private sector digital platforms, in particular (a) ISRO’s Bhuvan and (b) Google Public Data Explorer. To these proposals, we must now add one more dimension, namely, that the information system should not only be publicly accessible, but be a participatory system involving all interested citizens. It should be broad in scope and involve not only various Central and State Government agencies, but also all the Local Bodies and organizations such as industries and mines that are expected to document their pertinent activities. However, the fact that with the notable exception of the Sikkim springs programme of the Government of Sikkim, several long-standing opportunities such as Biological Diversity Act have so far not led to any concrete actions, indicates that the citizens must step in and take the initiative on their own. Such a people’s movement for making good environmental information openly available could very effectively piggyback on the hugely successful Wikipedia experiment

Deploying student power to monitor India's lifescape

Along with his many scientific contributions, Sdlim Ali will be remembered for a whole series of superbly written and illustrated books on Indian birds, books that played a key role in stimulating popular interest in India's rich living heritage. In honour of this great naturalist the Indian Academy of Sciences will launch on the occasion of his birth centenary a project called 'Lifescape' as a part of its initiative to enhance the quality of science education. This project aims to publish illustrated accounts of 2500 to 5000 Indian species of microorganisms, plants and animals. These accounts would help high school, college and postgraduate students and teachers of biology to reliably identify these species, and thereby constitute a basis for field exercises and projects focusing on first hand observations of living organisms. The information thus generated could feed into a countrywide system of monitoring ongoing changes in India's lifescape to support efforts at conservation of biological diversity, as well as control of weeds, pests, vectors and diseases. These accounts would also help create popular interest in the broader spectrum of India's biological wealth, much as Sdlim All's books have done for birdlife over the last fifty years

Science and the right to information

The many streams of human knowledge have been shaped by an interplay of seeking after truth and telling calculated lies, Of these, the folk and classical streams cannot effectively discriminate empirically valid knowledge from beliefs, and have grown slowly. Science is notably an organised enterprise of scepticism, anchoring itself firmly on the bedrock of empirical facts, thereby ensuring that deliberate manipulation of information is quickly exposed and eliminated.. Official knowledge, though claiming to be science based, permits itself to be manipulated by vested interests, by discouraging scrutiny As a result, much of the information base for managing India's environment is incomplete, outdated, or downright bogus The only way to correct this is to expose it to public scrutiny. The new Right to Information Act makes this possible The tools of information and communication technology can facilitate such scrutiny by making available all relevant information, in full detail, on a publicly accessible website Together, these developments present a tremendous opportunity to replace the current bureaucratic "control and command" by a "share and inform" approach

India's Deforestation: patterns and processes

Precolonial India was largely a nation of people who relied on their immediate surroundings for a diversity of biological resources and who had evolved a variety of cultural practices of prudent resource use. This system was radically transformed under British rule when cultivated as well as noncultivated lands were dedicated to the production of a small number of resources to be exported out of the locality. All tracts of erstwhile community-controlled lands were taken over as state property; some of these were set apart as reserved forest for commercial timber production; others were permitted to be used by local communities for meeting their biomass needs. The latter were no longer under community control and as no-man's-lands began to suffer over-exploitation. This process of nonsustainable forest use has been intensified after independence with forests increasingly dedicated to highly subsidized supply of raw materials to the forest-based industry