Technological innovations in shifting agricultural practices by three tribal farming communities of Meghalaya, northeast India

Technological innovations in shifting agricultural practices by three tribal farming communities of Meghalaya, northeast India B. K. TIWARI Department of Environmental Studies, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong 793022, Meghalaya, India Abstract: Shifting agricultural practices of three tribes of Meghalaya viz., Khasi, Garo and Karbi were studied to analyze and understand the technological innovations adopted by these communities in this age old practice. The methods used for this study involved participatory data collection on the socio-economics, agricultural practices and bio-physical resources through Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), household survey and participatory resource mapping of the villages. The study was carried out in six villages viz., Khrang, War-War, Kuswai, Khulia, Chekwatgre and Sasatgre two each inhabited by Khasi, Karbi and Garo tribes respectively. It was observed that a variety of indigenous technological innovations have been introduced by these communities for making the system more productive, less degradative and able to generate cash income for modern living. The innovations include: use of cover crops, retention of trees, prudent management of weeds, use of poles and logs for soil conservation, introduction of cash crops and fallow management. Evolved and adopted by these communities through experiential learning, these innovations have ample potential of replication elsewhere.

Freshwater species in North America are, as a group, far more imperiled than terrestrial species. According to NatureServe conservation status ranks, 35-60% of freshwater fishes, amphibians, mussels, snails, crayfish, stoneflies, and mayflies are threatened with extinction, whereas no terrestrial group, including vascular plants, has more than 28% of its species listed as threatened. Moreover, freshwater species have already suffered far more documented extinctions than terrestrial species. Two decades of highlighting the plight of freshwater species in North America has placed them (even invertebrates) firmly on the conservation agenda. For example, virtually every State Wildlife Action Plan has freshwater mussels in their lists of species of greatest conservation need. Targeted conservation actions, such as habitat protection, riparian restoration, and dam removal are benefitting some species. However, a review of change in conservation status ranks indicates that these efforts are at best staving off extinction – conservation statuses for these species have not shown a tendency toward improvement. Examining current stressors to freshwater animals indicates that restoring hydrological flow regimes remains the most pressing need for their conservation. With climate change threatening to lower water quantity and quality even more, we must redouble our activities to protect freshwater species to prevent many more from slipping to extinction.

The annual global demand for plastics has consistently increased and is now estimated at approximately 245 million tons. Nearly a third of the plastic resin production is converted into consumer packaging material that include disposable single-use items commonly encountered in beach debris. A particular concern is the occurrence of smaller pieces of plastic debris including those not visible to the naked eye, referred to as microplastics, in the world's oceans. Ingestion of microplastics by microbiota, presents a very real problem. The concern is their potential for delivery of concentrated persistent organic pollutants (POPs), mainly those picked up from sea water, to the organisms . It is these dissolved POPs that are toxic. To begin to understand the threat of microplastics and associated contaminants on wildlife, we are developing the capacity to quantify, and sampling for, microplastics and selected contaminants across multiple marine parks, from remote to highly-urbanized. These data will provide the basis for identifying the need to increase focus on management of marine debris, monitoring and management of species particularly susceptible to effects of microplastics (e.g. shorebirds) and development of education and outreach materials to increase awareness of this threat to the environment.

Man-made dams have had many deleterious environmental impacts throughout the world. In western North America, dams obstruct the main vector of nutrient subsidies to freshwater ecosystems from marine environments, salmon (Oncorhynchus spp). These subsidies have beneficial effects on recipient food webs. This has led to the removal or proposed removal of many dams, including the removal of two dams on the Elwha River, WA. To quantify the impacts of this unprecedented restoration, we are using stable isotopes (C, N) to track marine derived nutrients in a sensitive indicator of aquatic food web quality (American dipper Cinclus mexicanus). We examined impacts of salmon obstructions on body condition and migratory behavior. Stable-isotope ratios were more enriched in tissues from areas with intact salmon migrations, indicating greater consumption of salmon tissues and potential enrichment of invertebrate prey. Females breeding in areas with salmon migrations were in better condition and both sexes were more likely to occupy territories in fall. Juvenile dippers show the opposite trend in condition suggesting greater investment in reproduction in areas without salmon. Adult condition patterns were more pronounced behind anthropogenic, compared to natural, obstructions. These patterns indicate that dams have sizable, individual level impacts on aquatic consumers and provide a valuable baseline to track the recovery of this watershed following completion of dam removal in 2013.

For the past 20 years Jim Toomey has been writing and drawing the syndicated comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, which appears daily in over 150 newspapers. Through his cartoon, Toomey explores many ocean conservation issues and exposes his readers to odd forms of marine life and strange places. Using the ocean as a stage, he takes his characters far and wide. For example, Sherman and his friends have probed the depths of the Marianas Trench and hiked the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They’ve visited hydrothermal vents and collected manganese nodules for fun and profit. Toomey has also taken his story line to many marine reserves, such as Papah?naumoku?kea, the Great Barrier Reef, and Monterey Bay, where his characters frequently involve the native marine life in their harebrained schemes. In his presentation, Jim will address the challenge of informing the public about marine conservation issues through cartoons, with a particular emphasis on his many story lines that are set in marine reserves.

Carbon sequestration and biodiversity management are two synergistic global environmental initiatives that have the potential to help private landholders generate income while benefiting both climate change abatement and biodiversity preservation. To improve the outlook for biodiversity and meet the emission reduction abatement in Australia, an alteration in the management of agricultural landscapes will be necessary. Identifying the social and cultural drivers of private landholders who contribute to biodiverse carbon plantings can facilitate the success of bio-sequestration projects and biodiversity conservation programs. Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) have been applied as a decision support system to show the causal relationship. BBNs facilitate decision making process where policy makers have the chance to rationally choose between various actions, considering socio-economic and ecological outcomes. A social prototype has been built based on the literature review and experts opinion to explore the opportunities for higher participation of private landholders in biodiverse carbon plantings. The result reveals that strong social networks and availability of information are among those factors that impact the involvement of private landholders in such schemes. This reveals the areas that related policy design needs to be modified to tackle climate change and biodiversity degradation simultaneously.

Darters (Percidae) are benthic dwelling fish that inhabit small streams and are often used as bioindicator species in assessments of stream quality. Darters have small home ranges and specialized habitat requirements such as clean substrate and high flow. Darters are also sensitive to many factors associated with degraded aquatic habitats, particularly urban environments, such as high turbidity and temperature. Existing studies have analyzed urban-associated species composition changes at the fish community level, but few examine effects within one fish family. Identifying key anthropogenic stresses on composition changes within the darter family will shed light on how sensitive fish species are expected to respond to an increase in these stresses in an urbanizing landscape. My study analyzes drivers of darter composition of creeks and small rivers across ten sites, along an urban to rural gradient in Tennessee. I identified 22 darter species, with richness ranging from one to nine species. A multiple linear regression with richness as the response variable and dissolved oxygen, turbidity, water temperature and pH as explanatory variables revealed that the best predictor of richness was a model including both turbidity and water temperature. In addition, I am using GIS to analyze impacts of road and population density on darter composition and richness. These findings will help focus fish conservation efforts to avoid extirpation of sensitive species such as darters.

African conservation literature often frames the extraction of herbal medicine as an environmentally destructive activity. These medicinal plants, however, are frequently not classified into different vegetation types, leading to a misinterpretation of the pressure placed on the environment by their harvest and use. In Bénin, West Africa, plants are the main source of healthcare and women are the primary healthcare providers for women's and children's health. Does this plant extraction lead to resource decline? We investigated which vegetation type women access to harvest medicinal plants by conducting 92 questionnaires on women's and children's health among female herbal medicine merchants and urban and rural women. We also collected plant species and information on their vegetation type and cultivation status. Preliminary results reveal that 80% of the 370 collected species came from secondary vegetation and home gardens. The five most commonly cited species were: Ocimum gratissimum, Sarcocephalus latifolius, Securidaca longipedunculata, Citrus aurantifolia and Momordica charantia. Women who sold plants on the marketplace used more primary forest species than rural and urban women who harvested for personal use due their access to medicinal plants through trade. Since the majority of these plants are either cultivated or growing in human-altered vegetation, plant extraction for women and children's healthcare in Bénin can be considered a sustainable use of resources.

Outback Australia is one of the very few huge natural landscapes remaining on Earth. Its diverse tropical, arid and temperate ecosystems include enormous tracts of country which have not been directly impacted by industrial or agricultural activities. However, all its regions face ongoing high rates of extinctions of native plants and animals. In some regions threats to wildlife are posed by accelerating mining and associated water extraction, industrialization and fragmentation of habitat. However, Outback landscapes also face a suite of threats from a lack of active management, especially altered fire regimes and invasive feral animals and weeds. However, most of the Australian Outback now has fewer people residing and managing it than at any time in the last 50,000 or more years. Due to this lack of management many Australian plants and animals face ongoing declines and regional extinctions. Conservation in the Outback therefore requires both protective tenures and ongoing active management. Innovative new programs for Indigenous Rangers and improved management in national parks and privately owned reserves are providing a template for better management over Outback lands. These offer a way forward that works for wildlife, country and people.

Climate change, increasing habitat loss, human activities, and other threats mean that more species are in need of some form of intensive population management in order to avoid extinction. In situ and ex situ communities can maximize their conservation impacts by working together to develop one overall plan with a common goal to conserve a species. A threats and viability analysis can identify potential conservation role(s) for ex situ management that can be evaluated for feasibility and effectiveness. Potential benefits offered by ex situ activities may include offsetting the impact of specific threats, preventing imminent extinction of vulnerable populations, and/or preventing species extinction through assurance populations or biobanks. IUCN is finalizing a revision of its guidelines for the use of ex situ management for species conservation, which outlines a five-step decision process that defines potential ex situ conservation roles, determines the type of ex situ activities needed to fulfill those roles, and identifies the feasibility, risks, and likelihood of success. These guidelines will be applicable across taxa and for situations in which ex situ management is or is not currently underway. By identifying and critically evaluating specific ways in which ex situ strategies can improve population viability or prevent extinction, ex situ management can be used more effectively as a conservation tool as part of an integrated approach to species conservation planning.

The San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Plan (MSCP) exemplifies the challenges of developing robust monitoring programs for multiple species across multiple jurisdictions. One of the primary goals of the MSCP is to maintain and monitor functional connectivity for wildlife. Although connectivity monitoring efforts have been in place since 1996, managers still struggle to answer whether preserved lands are functionally connected and whether certain species are declining in response to increased development. The San Diego Tracking Team (SDTT), a citizen-based volunteer organization, has collected extensive data on mammal tracks throughout San Diego County since 2000. We used these data to determine spatial and temporal trends in species occurrence and assess large-scale habitat associations and impacts of land use changes for tracked species (coyote, mule deer, bobcat, raccoon, gray fox, and mountain lion). Results showed significant declines in species occurrence for coyote, mule deer, raccoons, and mountain lions as well as significant differences in species occurrence across sites. Although trends were detectable using these data, our ability to infer drivers of those trends was limited due to the lack of fine-scale landscape and habitat covariates at sampling sites. We conclude by providing recommendations to improve the SDTT's protocol to better inform connectivity management and wildlife response to habitat fragmentation.

The jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) forest in southwestern Australia is contained within a biodiversity hotspot; however there is limited knowledge about the distributions and habitat requirements of most of its native fauna. Mining and restoration in the region have created a mosaic of seral and mature forest. Native fauna species have been documented in the restored forest, but their continued use of these areas ultimately depends on their habitat requirements. We determined the habitat attributes of unmined forest influencing the occupancy of 5 native reptile species, in the family Scincidae, using data obtained at 35 unmined sites over 5 years. This information was used to create predictive occupancy maps and was compared with species data obtained in restored sites (3-20 years post restoration). Species generally occurred in restored sites less frequently than expected based on unmined preferences. This suggests that management of restored sites after initial planting is required to promote reptile recolonization. Recommendations, based on surveys and habitat models, for improving restoration and reptile return are species specific and include debris piles, thinning and increasing heterogeneity. Our study addresses 5 of the potential 26 native reptiles in the region due to low detection rates, and thus provides an initial study into improving restoration to maintain reptile diversity and highlights the need for research on the less common or cryptic species present.

Conservation of natural areas frequently requires volunteer assistance. Volunteers gain from these experiences, but do not always learn much. By integrating Service-Learning into course curricula, students learn about the science going into conservation planning and restoration projects. Three examples of courses will be presented. Marine Biology, focused on the ubiquitous problem of marine debris by examining the path of trash to the Chesapeake Bay. Students in this course collected data about trash along the Jones Falls Watershed and shared that information with the community. A second course, Science of the Chesapeake Bay, is a course for non-science majors. Students in this course partnered with a local homeowners association, preparing seeds, growing plugs, and beginning a pilot study for a shoreline restoration project. The service component was completely integrated into the curriculum for the third course, Conservation Biology. This course focused on coastal conservation, but specifically focused on monitoring the ecological relationship between the Spartina marsh ecosystem and the eastern oyster. Students worked directly with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, gaining valuable experience, while providing manpower and data. These types of courses can provide hands-on learning about scientific principles, opportunities for learning about conservation organizations and their functions, and directly connect students to their community and natural environment.

Conservation managers charged with designing and implementing threatened species management decisions in an uncertain world, face a dilemma: Should they invest in actions that result in small but certain gains or invest in actions with a higher risk of failure but greater potential benefits? By exploring levels of possible risk aversion of a management agency and using these as thresholds, we demonstrate how a decision can be selected that either (a) maximises expected returns for a given level of risk, or (b) minimises the risk of a decision for a given expected return. We examine two different approaches and a range of risk aversion thresholds to explore the consequences of investing in projects with uncertain outcomes, using a case study of managing threatened species in New Zealand. We define benefits in three ways: (a) total number of species managed, (b) representation of taxonomic groups, and (c) pooled extinction risk of species selected for or excluded from management. The species selected differ depending on the management objective, and on the way in which benefits are defined, highlighting the importance of clear objectives in the decision-making process. Accepting high risk selects more species for management, which are more likely to go extinct without management. Low risk tolerance prioritises more costly species with lower extinction risk and taxonomic diversity. We discuss how managers can best identify thresholds where the risk-return trade-off is balanced.