A NOVEL METHOD FOR WATER AND WATER CANAL EXTRACTION FROM LANDSAT-8 OLI IMAGERY

Constituents of hydrologic network, River and water canals play a key role in Agriculture for cultivation, Industrial activities and urban planning. Remote sensing images can be effectively used for water canal extraction, which significantly improves the accuracy and reduces the cost involved in mapping using conventional means. Using remote sensing data, the water Index (WI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and Modified NDWI (MNDWI) are used in extracting the water bodies. These techniques are aimed at water body detection and need to be complemented with additional information for the extraction of complete water canal networks. The proposed index MNDWI-2 is able to find the water bodies and water canals as well from the Landsat-8 OLI imagery and is based on the SWIR2 band. In this paper, we use Level-1 precision terrain corrected OLI imagery at 30 meter spatial resolution. The proposed MNDWI-2 index is derived using SWIR2 (B7) band and Green (B3) band. The usage of SWIR2 band over SWIR1 results in very low reflectance values for water features, detection of shallow water and delineation of water features with rest of the features in the image. The computed MNDWI-2 index values are threshold by making the values greater than zero as 1 and less than zero as zero. The binarised values of 1 represent the water bodies and 0 represent the non-water body. This normalized index detects the water bodies and canals as well as vegetation which appears in the form of noise. The vegetation from the MNDWI-2 image is removed by using the NDVI index, which is calculated using the Top of Atmosphere (TOA) corrected images. The paper presents the results of water canal extraction in comparison with the major available indexes. The proposed index can be used for water and water canal extraction from L8 OLI imagery, and can be extended for other high resolution sensors

Dokur Village at a Glance

Dokur village, located in Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh was chosen for Village-Level Studies (VLS) initiated in 1975 by the Economics Program of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru, Hyderabad. The present Mahbubnagar district is also known as Palamooru, located in the Telangana Region of Andhra Pradesh. Dokur village (16° 36’ N and 78° 50’ E) is situated in Devarkadra mandal in Mahbubnagar District (16° 73’ N and 77° 98’ E). Dokur’s original name was “Dakur” derived from the Indo-Persian Urdu word “daku,” meaning “gang of armed dacoits”. It is believed that dacoits used to take shelter in Dakur due to its thick vegetation. Eventually, the name Dakur became corrupted to Dokur. Dokur is about 130 km from Hyderabad. To reach Dokur from Hyderabad, one needs to travel to Mahbubnagar district headquarters and then to Deverkadra mandal on the surfaced Hyderabad- Raichur road, and then travel a further distance of seven kilometers south on a metal road. Autorickshaws and Road Transport Corporation buses are the main means of transportation from Devarkadra to Dokur

Heavy metals concentration in soils under rainfed agro-ecosystems and their relationship with soil properties and management practices

Heavy metals are governed by parent material of soils and influenced by the soil physicochemical properties and soil and crop management practices. This paper evaluates total heavy metal concentrations in rainfed soils under diverse management practices of tropical India. Vertisols (clayey soils with high shrink/swell capacity) had the highest concentrations of heavy metals. However, chromium (Cr) content was above the threshold value in Aridisol [calcium carbonate (CaCO3)]-containing soils of the arid environments with subsurface horizon development. Concentration increased at lower depths (>30 cm). Basaltic soils showed higher concentrations of nickel (Ni), copper (Cu) and manganese (Mn). Cadmium (Cd), cobalt (Co), Cu and Mn concentrations were higher in soils cultivated to cotton, whereas Cr concentration was above the threshold level of 110 mg kg−1 in food crop cultivated soils. As the specific soil surface is closely related to clay content and clay type, soil’s ability to retain heavy metals is more closely tied to the specific surface than to the soil cation exchange capacity. Higher positive correlations were found between heavy metal concentrations and clay content [Cd(r = 0.85; p ≤ 0.01); Co (r = 0.88; p ≤ 0.05); Ni (r = 0.87; p ≤ 0.01); Co (r = 0.81; p ≤ 0.05); Zn (r = 0.49; p ≤ 0.01); Cr (r = 0.80; p ≤ 0.05); Mn (r = 0.79; p ≤ 0.01)]. The amounts of nitrogen–phosphorus–potassium applied showed a positive correlation with Co and Ni (r = 0.62; p ≤ 0.05). As several soils used for growing food crops are high in Ni, Cr and Mn, the flow of these metals in soil–plant–livestock/human chain needs further attention

Understanding our seas: National Institute of Oceanography, Goa

The present article summarizes the research done at the CSIR–National Institute of Oceanography in 2014 in ocean science, resources and technology. Significant research has been conducted on air–sea interactions and coastal circulation, biogeochemistry, biology, marine geophysics, palaeoceanography, marine fishery, gas hydrates and wave energy. Technological advances covered topics like oceanographic tools. Major strides have been made in marine resources research and evaluation

Understanding our seas: National Institute of Oceanography, Goa

The present article summarizes the research done at the CSIR–National Institute of Oceanography in 2014 in ocean science, resources and technology. Significant research has been conducted on air–sea interactions and coastal circulation, biogeochemistry, biology, marine geophysics, palaeoceanography, marine fishery, gas hydrates and wave energy. Technological advances covered topics like oceanographic tools. Major strides have been made in marine resources research and evaluation

Null dust in canonical gravity

We present the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian framework which incorporates null dust as a source into canonical gravity. Null dust is a generalized Lagrangian system which is described by six Clebsch potentials of its four-velocity Pfaff form. The Dirac--ADM decomposition splits these into three canonical coordinates (the comoving coordinates of the dust) and their conjugate momenta (appropriate projections of four-velocity). Unlike ordinary dust of massive particles, null dust therefore has three rather than four degrees of freedom per space point. These are evolved by a Hamiltonian which is a linear combination of energy and momentum densities of the dust. The energy density is the norm of the momentum density with respect to the spatial metric. The coupling to geometry is achieved by adding these densities to the gravitational super-Hamiltonian and supermomentum. This leads to appropriate Hamiltonian and momentum constraints in the phase space of the system. The constraints can be rewritten in two alternative forms in which they generate a true Lie algebra. The Dirac constraint quantization of the system is formally accomplished by imposing the new constraints as quantum operator restrictions on state functionals. We compare the canonical schemes for null and ordinary dust and emhasize their differences.Comment: 25 pages, REVTEX, no figure

Report of the Task Force on Enhancing technology use in agriculture insurance

Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) is a flagship scheme of the Government of India to provide insurance coverage and financial support to farmers in the event of failure of any of the notified crops, unsown area and damage to harvest produce as a result of natural calamities, pests and diseases to stabilise the income of farmers, and to encourage them to adopt modern agricultural practices. The scheme is a considerable improvement over all previous insurance schemes in India and is heavily subsidised by the state and central governments. The scheme aims to cover 50 percent of the farming households within next 3 years. During its implementation in the last one season, several challenges relating to enrolment, yield estimation, loss assessment, and claim settlement were reported by farmers, insurance companies as well as the state governments. It was also noted that several technological opportunities existed for possibly leveraging support to the Indian crop insurance program for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. NITI Aayog of the Government of India, therefore, constituted a Task Force to deliberate on this subject and identify such potential opportunities. This report summarises the recommendations of the Task Force. The Task Force constituted to address the issue of technology support to crop insurance comprised the following 5 sub-groups: (1) Remote Sensing & Drones; (2) Decision Support Systems, Crop Modelling & Integrated Approaches; (3) IT/ICT in Insurance; (4) Crop Cutting Experiments (CCEs); and (5) Technologies for Livestock and Aquaculture Insurance. Each sub-group had several discussions with experts in the respective areas, and submitted draft reports. More than 100 experts related to professional research agencies, insurance industry, banks, and the government contributed to these discussions. Technological options available in the country and abroad were considered by all groups. The Task Force together with the sub-groups then deliberated on key issues and formulated its recommendations as presented in this report. During the discussions it was realised that there were many administrative and institutional issues that needed to be addressed in PMFBY. However, the focus of the Task Force was on its main mandate, technology use in crop insurance. We hope these recommendations would help the Indian crop insurance sector take full advantage of the technological options suggested so as to increase its efficacy and effectiveness leading to reduced agrarian distress in the country

A bibliography of parasites and diseases of marine and freshwater fishes of India

With the increasing demand for fish as human food, aquaculture both in freshwater and salt water is rapidly developing over the world. In the developing countries, fishes are being raised as food. In many countries fish farming is a very important economic activity. The most recent branch, mariculture, has shown advances in raising fishes in brackish, estuarine and bay waters, in which marine, anadromous and catadromous fishes have successfully been grown and maintained

αA-Crystallin Peptide 66SDRDKFVIFLDVKHF80 Accumulating in Aging Lens Impairs the Function of α-Crystallin and Induces Lens Protein Aggregation

The eye lens is composed of fiber cells that are filled with α-, β- and γ-crystallins. The primary function of crystallins is to maintain the clarity of the lens through ordered interactions as well as through the chaperone-like function of α-crystallin. With aging, the chaperone function of α-crystallin decreases, with the concomitant accumulation of water-insoluble, light-scattering oligomers and crystallin-derived peptides. The role of crystallin-derived peptides in age-related lens protein aggregation and insolubilization is not understood.We found that αA-crystallin-derived peptide, (66)SDRDKFVIFLDVKHF(80), which accumulates in the aging lens, can inhibit the chaperone activity of α-crystallin and cause aggregation and precipitation of lens crystallins. Age-related change in the concentration of αA-(66-80) peptide was estimated by mass spectrometry. The interaction of the peptide with native crystallin was studied by multi-angle light scattering and fluorescence methods. High molar ratios of peptide-to-crystallin were favourable for aggregation and precipitation. Time-lapse recordings showed that, in the presence of αA-(66-80) peptide, α-crystallin aggregates and functions as a nucleus for protein aggregation, attracting aggregation of additional α-, β- and γ-crystallins. Additionally, the αA-(66-80) peptide shares the principal properties of amyloid peptides, such as β-sheet structure and fibril formation.These results suggest that crystallin-derived peptides such as αA-(66-80), generated in vivo, can induce age-related lens changes by disrupting the structure and organization of crystallins, leading to their insolubilization. The accumulation of such peptides in aging lenses may explain a novel mechanism for age-related crystallin aggregation and cataractogenesis