Urban heritage conservation and rapid urbanization : insights from Surat, India

Currently, heritage is challenged in the Indian city of Surat due to diverse pressures,  including rapid urbanization, increasing housing demand, and socio‐cultural and climate changes.  Where rapid demographic growth of urban areas is happening, heritage is disappearing at an  alarming rate. Despite some efforts from the local government, urban cultural heritage is being  neglected and historic buildings keep being replaced by ordinary concrete buildings at a worryingly  rapid pace. Discussions of challenges and issues of Surat’s urban area is supported by a qualitative  dataset, including in‐depth semi‐structured interviews and focus groups with local policy makers,  planners, and heritage experts, triangulated by observation and a photo‐survey of two historic  areas. Findings from this study reveal a myriad of challenges such as: inadequacy of urban  conservation management policies and processes focused on heritage, absence of skills, training,  and resources amongst decision makers and persistent conflict and competition between heritage  conservation needs and developers’ interests. Furthermore, the values and significance of Surat’s  tangible and intangible heritage is not fully recognized by its citizens and heritage stakeholders. A  crucial opportunity exists for Surat to maximize the potential of heritage and reinforce urban  identity for its present and future generations. Surat’s context is representative of general trends  and conservation challenges and therefore recommendations developed in this study hold the  potential to offer interesting insights to the wider planners and conservationists’ international  community.  This  paper  recommends  thoughtful  integration  of  sustainable  heritage  urban  conservation into local urban development frameworks and the establishment of approaches that  recognize the plurality of heritage values

Significance of Grasses in Establishment of Ecological Restoration in Mined out Degraded Land in Jharia Coalfield, Dhanbad

This paper reviews the experience of ecological restoration adopted by Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a Miniratna Company, a subsidiary of Coal India Limited, Government of India, Public Sector Undertaking to restore the mined out degraded land in Jharia Coalfield (JCF). JCF is one of the oldest coalfield of India and was mined in an unscientific manner for more than 100 years by the erstwhile private entrepreneurs until it was nationalised in 1972-73, due to which the coalfield was subjected to severe land degradation, mine fires and subsidence. The total degraded land in the JCF in 1986 was 6,294 hectares. In the span of ~25 years (1986-2011), BCCL had taken up plantation/afforestation on 3676 ha of degraded lands through District Forest Office. Now, BCCL is trying to restore these mined out degraded land ecologically. The ecological restoration is to establish a three-tier vegetation comprising of native species grasses as lower tier, shrubs and bushes as middle tier and trees as upper tier with an objective to establish biodiversity and food chain; to improve the local climate regime and socio-economic condition. In 2011, BCCL in association with Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehradun and Prof. CR Babu, Centre for Environmental Management of Degraded Ecosystem (CEMDE), Delhi University started ecological restoration of the mined out degraded land and overburden dumps. Two study sites were taken up in 2011-12; one at Damoda (23°47\u27N and 86°30\u27E) of 7 ha and another at Tetulmari (23°81\u27N and 86°33\u27E) of 8 ha, respectively. The mined dumps were composed of big and small boulders of shaly sandstone, sandstone, shale and with traces of soil. Earlier, these dumps were profusely invaded by exotic weeds like Parthenium hysterophorus, Croton bonplandianus, Xanthium strumarium and Eupatorium odoratum, Lantana camara. Due to more than 100 years of mining and severe land degradation, there is no soil cover on the dumps and was poor in nutrients. Efforts were specially made in selection of species which are native to the region; generate the large quantity of biomass to enrich the soil; ability to stabilize the soil structure; utility to the local community. Therefore, species of trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses with multiple use value like fuel, fodder, fruit, medicine were used during the process of ecological restoration. In our study, the importance was given to the establishment of grass cover as grasses generate larger quantity of biomass; stabilize the slopes and bind the stratum. The grass cover also plays a key role in establishment of the lower trophic levels of the ecosystem. The grass species introduced are Cenchrus ciliaris, Cenchrus setigerus, Pennisetum pedicellatum, Heteropogon, Stylosanthes,hamata, Chrysopogon, Bothriochloia, Thysanolaena latifolia, Dichanthium, Arundo, Eragrostis, Cynodon dactylon, Chloris, Digitaria, Saccharum spontaneum, and Panicum. In addition, Shrub species Dodonaea viscose, Vitex negundo, Dendrocalamus strictus, Dendrocalamus asper and Bambusa bambos, Woodfordia fruticosa, Calotropis procera, Cassia tora, Datura stramonium, Ziziphus mauritiana, Tephrosia purpurea, Adhatoda zeylanica and Agave sislana and the tree species Albizia procera, Dalbergia sisso, Phyllanthus embilica, Albizia lebbeck, Bahunia variegate, Aegle Marmelos, madhuca indica, Ficus religiosa, Ficus hispida, Syzygium cumini, Casia Fistula etc have been introduced

On the Progenitor System of the Type Iax Supernova 2014dt in M61

We present pre-explosion and post-explosion Hubble Space Telescope images of the Type Iax supernova (SN Iax) 2014dt in M61. After astrometrically aligning these images, we do not detect any stellar sources at the position of the SN in the pre-explosion images to relatively deep limits (3 sigma limits of M_F438W > -5.0 mag and M_F814W > -5.9 mag). These limits are similar to the luminosity of SN 2012Z's progenitor system (M_F435W = -5.43 +/- 0.15 and M_F814W = -5.24 +/- 0.16 mag), the only probable detected progenitor system in pre-explosion images of a SN Iax, and indeed, of any white dwarf supernova. SN 2014dt is consistent with having a C/O white-dwarf primary/helium-star companion progenitor system, as was suggested for SN 2012Z, although perhaps with a slightly smaller or hotter donor. The data are also consistent with SN 2014dt having a low-mass red giant or main-sequence star companion. The data rule out main-sequence stars with M_init > 16 M_sun and most evolved stars with M_init > 8 M_sun as being the progenitor of SN 2014dt. Hot Wolf-Rayet stars are also allowed, but the lack of nearby bright sources makes this scenario unlikely. Because of its proximity (D = 12 Mpc), SN 2014dt is ideal for long-term monitoring, where images in ~2 years may detect the companion star or the luminous bound remnant of the progenitor white dwarf.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJ

Evidence of Levy stable process in tokamak edge turbulence

The time series of floating potential and poloidal electric field fluctuations in the edge plasma of ohmically heated ADITYA tokamak [Phys. Plasmas 4, 4292 (1997)] are analyzed for self-similarity. It is observed that the distribution function of a sum of n data points converges to a self-similar distribution of Levy scale index, α=1.1-1.3 for n ≤ 40 and α=1.8-2.0 for larger n. This shows that the scaling properties of small scale fluctuations are non-Gaussian and those of large scale fluctuations are Gaussian. Implication of this observation to our understanding of plasma transport is discussed

Evolution of dopant-induced helium nanoplasmas

Two-component nanoplasmas generated by strong-field ionization of doped helium nanodroplets are studied in a pump-probe experiment using few-cycle laser pulses in combination with molecular dynamics simulations. High yields of helium ions and a pronounced, droplet size-dependent resonance structure in the pump-probe transients reveal the evolution of the dopant-induced helium nanoplasma. The pump-probe dynamics is interpreted in terms of strong inner ionization by the pump pulse and resonant heating by the probe pulse which controls the final charge states detected via the frustration of electron-ion recombination