Stutee Gupta

Human modification of the tropical rain forest of Nicobar islands: indicators from land use land cover mapping.

Abstract Tropical forests are pre-disposed to human induced modification throughout the world. It has serious implications at local, regional and the global levels. Repercussions are more severe in the island ecosystems since they are ecologically vulnerable and fragile. The present paper attempts to investigate the linkages between socio-economic drivers and the consequent modification of the landscape in terms of forest loss, in the Nicobar group of islands based on indicators derived from land use land cover mapping of the satellite remote sensing data. Although these islands have more than 80% of the area under forests but the situation varies in each of the twelve inhabited island of the group and they are under the varying degree of human pressure. Most active driver is the coconut plantation in addition to time-to-time clearing made in the past. There is a need to investigate the on-going modification of the land cover in these islands and satellite remote sensing forms a useful tool for such studies

Nicobari Tribe of the Car Nicobar Island: Keeping in Pace with Time

Abstract Tropical rain forests worldwide are home to millions of tribal population belonging to diverse communities. During last few decades population pressure and migration of settlers in tribal areas for developmental needs have currently threaten the existence of the aboriginals. Most of the ethnobotanical knowledge in India is concentrated in remote tribal areas. The use of plant species in sustainably with nature lies hidden with native people, living in vicinity with nature.

Step by step designing of composite right left handed leaky wave antenna on Substrate integrated waveguide using S Slots

A step by step designing of Composite right left handed transmission line Substrate integrated waveguide Leaky wave antenna with novel S shaped slots is presented. The S slots etched on the upper plate of the Substrate Integrated Waveguide provides the series capacitance necessary for the realization of composite right left handed transmission line unit cell. A 1 D periodic array of the proposed unit cell is designed showing contionous beam scanning in a wide range of -33 deg to 25 deg for the frequency scan of 32 GHz to 42 GHz. Simulated results show that the antenna radiates with almost constant & high gain values of approximately 15 dBi max and a first sidelobe level of around 3 dBi.

Role of Citizen Science in Northwestern Himalaya: Use Case on Disaster, Bio-resource, and Governance

Mountain regions represent most fragile and vulnerable ecosystems (UNCED 1992) facing threats due to unpredictable socioeconomic and climate changes as well as unsustainable land use practices. The impact of unsustainable practices on the mountains is manifested in the form of depletion of bio-resources and increased occurrence of extreme events such as floods, forest fire, landslides, etc. Geospatial technology consisting of remote sensing (RS), geographic information system (GIS), and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) has a huge potential in natural resource management including governance and other environmental issues. Moreover studying the geographic phenomenon requires a large amount of data to be collected/created to model the said phenomenon to improve understanding. Citizen science these days is a valuable and important method, in which nonspecialists also called as volunteers work toward a collection of data of scientific importance in a short span of time using the power of people/volunteers. Citizen science has been globally utilized in areas like support toward policy, electronic government, and digital democracy (Shirky 2008). Citizen science approach is very useful especially in disaster management like during recent earthquake disasters in Haiti, 2010 (Zook et al. 2010), and Nepal, 2015 (Dittus et al. 2017), assisting rescue and relief efforts. With the penetration of the Internet at grassroots levels, the advent of Web 2.0 and the availability of smartphones with good quality camera and onboard GPS receivers have supported and encouraged citizen science initiatives worldwide. These technologies enable volunteers to gather valuable dataset with geolocation (geotagged) including photographs, audio, and videos. In today’s scenario, citizens have a valuable and active role as they work like “sensors” (citizens as sensors (Goodchild 2007)) assisting the state/national administrative or official initiatives through gathering and interpreting datasets. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the classic example of citizen science approach in which a huge number of people work as volunteers by building, correcting, and revising the textual material. Likewise in the geospatial field, the popular example is the OpenStreetMap project (www.openstreetmap.org). Here volunteers work as nonspecialists toward mapping of the entire globe. Furthermore data is made available under open-access model.

Analyzing the performance of a microstrip patch antenna with metamaterial cover by varying the distance and dielectric constant in between

A metamaterial slab applied as cover in front of a patch antenna focuses the radiations from patch, reduces the beam-width, thus enhancing the Gain and Directivity. Usually the slab is placed at quarter wave distance from the patch; this paper focuses on investigating the effects of varying this distance. Also, if a dielectric is placed in between metamaterial cover and patch antenna, the effects of changing the value of dielectric constant are presented in this paper. The metamaterial under consideration is a modification of Pendry’s SRR structure, its unit cell is formed by connecting metallic traces of two-edge-coupled split ring resonators to form the infinity symbol on one side of the substrate and an array of conducting wires on the other. The unit cells were arranged to form an array and an investigation of S-parameters was done to check the negative index property. A conventional patch antenna generally shows 3 dB beam-width of ~80° and 5–6 dB gain, whereas the antenna presented in this paper with the metamaterial cover shows improved 3 dB beam-width of ~53° with gain more than 9 dB.

Gain Improvement of Microstrip Patch Antenna Using Negative Permeability Metamaterial Reflecting Surface

Abstract:This methodology involves complementary square split ring resonators and a microstrip patch antenna both designed to resonate at same frquency.The proposed antenna is made by using metamaterial reflecting surface to obtain the maximum gain hight of reflecting surface is adjusted.we uses an array of squared split ring resonator (SRR) printed on a low dielectric constant material as the MRS, which is suspended over a probe-fed patch antenna. HFSS simulation of the proposed antenna shows improved gain and return loss at the centre frequency of 4.72 GHz.By using metamaterial reflecting surface technique we obtain 4.87db gain improvement.

Evaluation of Cartographic accuracy of IRS-1A LISS II data for upgrading linear details on the existing maps (A case study of Chandigarh area)

Considering the fest pace of development, up-to-date maps have become imperative in developmental planning. Conventional map updating techniques are expensive and time consuming. The present paper makes an attempt to tackle the problem using GIS techniques. Maps generated from IRS-1A LISS II data and Survey of India (SOI) toposheets were used as input maps in GIS. These maps were overlaid to obtain the positional errors at road junction points. The area statistics of each sector were calculated taking the SOI map as reference data. The results show that the areas calculated from LISS II data and SOI map are well comparable and the deviations are within 10%, whereas the positional accuracy (MSE) of points is within 30 m. The study demonstrates that the IRS-1A LISS II data can be used for updating of maps on scale 1:100,000 and smaller in areas where linear features are identifiable in the IRS LISS II image.