Pools and fluxes in ecosystems
Pools (quantities and storage) and fluxes (movement) of energy and matter are important concepts in ecology and ecosystem studies. This post gives an introduction to these concepts.
High Conservation Value Areas: All you need to know
The concept of High Conservation Value Areas (HCVAs) is not very widely documented or known. General knowledge is never bad, so I went ahead and complied a list of questions that I think will give you a cursory knowledge of what these areas are and why they are […]
Groundwater recharge through irrigation losses in New Zealand
A guest blog by Nigel Cowburn. Nigel is a landscape architect based in New Zealand. I recently attended the New Zealand Irrigation Conference. One topic that came up often was aquifer recharge. NZ is undergoing a rapid shift from government funded irrigation to private sector schemes. The […]
Is groundwater a reliable source of water for communities?
Traditionally, communities all over the world have relied on fresh surface water to meet their water needs. Thus, with the advent of urban centers and rapid development, one of the first thrust areas was to control and store surface water resources so that the population of an area […]
How does LULC change affect groundwater recharge?
It has been seen all over the world that while the land cover is changing rapidly, the effect it is having on groundwater and it’s recharge is becoming more and more significant. This is especially true in places that rely solely on groundwater to meet their water needs. […]
Why is shifting cultivation being blamed for land degradation?
I’m on a study tour through South India, visiting different National Parks and scientific institutes. Today was my first day, and already, the lectures we had were extremely interesting… One of the lectures I really found fascinating was given by Amit Jose Kurian, a research scholar at the […]
Disturbance: Driving changes in the universe
(This is the fourth post in the “feedback loops” series) Imagine a world where nothing interacted with anything. Each entity, molecule and atom remained in isolation. They could not feel or touch each other, directly or indirectly……. That would be a dead world.
