Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Dr. Kamal Bawa Gets Midori 2014 Prize For Biodiversity

WASHINGTON: An evolutionary Indian ecologist, Kamal Bawa has won the prestigious USD 100,000 Midori Prize for biodiversity for his pioneering research, including in climate change in the Himalayas.


Photo: Wikipedia

The AEON Environmental Foundation, Japan, established the Midori Prize for Biodiversity in 2010, which is given to only three individuals, who have made outstanding contributions to conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity at global, regional or local levels.

Mr Bawa, 75, would be receiving the award in October, 2014 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, at COP-12, when India, current chair of the Conference of Parties (COP-11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), will pass the baton to Korea, according to a media release from ATREE.

He is also the president of Bangalore-based environmental research organization ATREE (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment).

" He has woken up local and global audiences to the perils of the loss of our natural wealth and its associated cultural wealth," Ganesan Balachander, Director of ATREE said.

"The prize underscores the importance of biodiversity to humanity and an inclusive and multidimensional approach to biodiversity conservation that my own research programme have advocated during the past few decades," he said.

Mr Bawa, who has taught at the University of Massachusetts for more than 40 years, had also received international recognition as the recipient of the first Gunnerus Award in Sustainability Science, a major international prize, in 2012.

Story on NDTV

Zee News

Jagran Josh

India TV




Sunday, September 7, 2014

Parthenos special issue on Odonates : Call for articles

As a part of DragonflyIndia's 10th anniversary, we will be publishing a special issue of Parthenos (Newsletter of DiversityIndia) on odonates. If you want to contribute, please send your article to Parthenos before 15 Septemeber 2014. It will be helpful to get title and abstract of your article in advance. 



The article should be in Times New Roman, font size 12, normal margin, text justified. For previous issues of Parthenos please click on - http://diversityindia.org/Parthenos/ 

For Parthenos 

Pankaj Koparde and Amol Patwardhan

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Systematic documentation of Odonates in India

Over years we have been sharing lot of information, resources and records of Odonates on out community forums be it Yahoo, FB or other. We also attempted collecting data about Pantala migration using a form [http://diversityindia.org/dragon/]. Now we need to step up our efforts.


Members are gearing up for more serious data collection now and this was also discussed at length during the DragonflyIndia workshop at Nagpur. It will be great to kick start the campaign around the group anniversary, which is just a month away now.

There could be several ways to do this. One of the ideas is to start consciously using the biodiversity portals like India Biodiversity Portal [http://indiabiodiversity.org/] to post all our photographs in the form of records. The advantage is the data will be built for us and can be quickly retrieved anytime. Under the DragonflyIndia group we already have more than 950 such records posted. [http://indiabiodiversity.org/group/dragonflies_of_india/]



What we can do is all the members commit to post at least 10 records each and help identify or comment 10 records each. This will serve two purpose. First it will force all of us to be familiar with the portal and with say 100 members generate 1000 more records. These records could be of very common species too. They will help us start developing understanding of our Odonates. Let us all do it between today and 1st October 2014.

In case you are not familiar with IBP or iNaturalist, feel free to ask for help on the group itself.


Comments and suggestions welcome.