Anita Arjundas is executive director of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, a globally renowned non-profit organisation working to conserve biodiversity.
ATREE works across a range of disciplines on issues relating to biodiversity conservation and restoration, water security, sustainable resource use, people's livelihoods and well-being, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. It is ranked among the top 20 environmental think tanks in the world.
Anita spoke to indianexpress.com about technological innovations in the field of biodiversity and the challenges faced by engineers and biodiversity researchers while balancing the benefits of innovations with their potential impact on forest communities. Edited excerpts:
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us how engineers and biodiversity organisations work together to identify problems and find solutions.
Anita Arjundas: Technologists and biodiversity organizations are working together in many ways. One example is the global RE-FOREST-ER consortium competing in the internationally renowned XPRIZE Rainforest. They bring together skills in geospatial analysis, rainforest restoration, and large-scale commercial eDNA facilities to address sustainable conservation using remote sensing and cloud-based geographic information systems, AI algorithms, and eDNA analysis. These XPRIZE challenges are global, and these incentives are driving dramatic changes in technology.
In India, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and open-access platforms are helping answer questions at a scale and in ways that were not possible before. For example, ATREE was invited to join the CoRE Stack initiative, led by IIT Delhi and IIT Palakkad, to help communities build their natural resource capacity. CoRE Stack combines publicly available data and machine learning to create a data-driven approach to understand the socio-ecological characteristics of landscapes. It also helps communities propose action plans for natural resource management through community-friendly digital tools.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How are robots, drones and sensors making the work of conservationists easier? Can you give us some examples?
Anita Arjundas: Robots, drones and sensors can help solve environmental problems in hard-to-reach areas. These technologies can be used for a variety of applications, from remote monitoring to collecting biological materials to large-scale reforestation.
Remote monitoring via drones, robots and sensors has certainly reduced the monetary and logistical costs of surveillance, but it may be premature to say that it has simplified our lives.
For example, the Assam Forest Department monitors the speed of vehicles along the national highway through Kaziranga National Park with quite good accuracy using sensor-based cameras, but it also needs to set up a control center to monitor the cameras.Similarly, an attempt was made a few years ago to install sensors to monitor the health of a lake in Bangalore, but they failed within a few days as algal biofilms quickly formed in the lake's nutrient-rich environment.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: There is this concept of the Internet of Wildlife, but how does it work on the ground? What other functions does it have apart from remote monitoring?
Anita Arjundas: The Internet of Wildlife (IoWT) applies the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) to the natural world. Sensor-equipped devices are placed in animals' habitats to capture data about wildlife and their environments. In India, researchers, government, and local agencies are using passive acoustic sensors to monitor landscapes and track ecosystem recovery in the Western Ghats and across central India.
At ATREE, scientists focusing on movement ecology use radio collars and tags to assess how habitat changes affect local and long-distance movements of animals and migratory birds. These sensors help understand how movements affect human-wildlife interactions and local livelihoods, and how animal and bird movements themselves respond to habitat and land-use changes. Recently, the state of Tamil Nadu installed sensor-based cameras that detect the presence of elephants near railway tracks and alert railway officials, allowing them to respond quickly and consistently, reducing the chances of accidents and elephant deaths.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How does bioremediation technology work and what are some success stories in India and globally?
Anita Arjundas: Bioremediation techniques certainly hold promise in terms of restoring lakes. Examples of such techniques include floating islands and constructed wetlands. These systems use the microcosm within the root zone of plants to remove excess nutrients and toxic metals from the water. Additionally, algae, particularly cyanobacteria, which were once considered problematic, are now being used to absorb nutrients. Once harvested, the algae can then be processed into ingredients for everyday consumer products.
ATREE water scientists have used constructed wetlands to create a cost-effective solution for wastewater treatment in Jakkur Lake and are developing a similar system for Bengaluru's Venkateshpura Lake.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: There's a lot of discussion about crowdsourced monitoring and citizen science. Does it really work or is it just a feel-good ploy?
Anita Arjundas: Smartphones have democratized the process of data collection, aiding in crowdsourced monitoring and citizen science. Scientists and researchers can now detect patterns and processes much faster and at lower cost than ever before. For example, citizen science data enabled the SeasonWatch team to detect signs of changes in flowering and fruiting patterns of some trees that are likely responding to climate change. SeasonWatch is a citizen science project taking place across India, tracking leaf, flower and fruit emergence and ripening patterns of common tree species in the country. SeasonWatch uses citizen science to monitor the annual flowering, fruiting and leaf unfolding cycles of over 130 common tree species.
Another example is the report on the status of birds in India, which uses over 30 million observations uploaded by over 30,000 birdwatchers on Cornell University's eBird platform. This citizen-collected data allows for an assessment of the distribution range of 942 Indian bird species. ATREE scientists are part of this effort to assess the conservation status of birds in India.
Governments are also recognising the power of these efforts: for example, the Tamil Nadu government’s pioneering policy on invasive species management highlights MIAP (Mapping Invasive Alien Plants), an ATREE and Keystone Foundation-led initiative that uses citizen science to map several invasive alien plants.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: There is a trend to develop open source technologies and open hardware for biodiversity conservation and research. How does this work?
Anita Arjundas: Open source software and satellite imagery data have long been widely used in biodiversity conservation and research. In the past few years, cloud computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine have taken this a step further by eliminating the need for costly computing and data storage infrastructure. This makes it possible to track long-term ecosystem degradation and map threatened open natural ecosystems across entire countries.
Other initiatives like MeITY's Bhashini platform have created an AI-based approach to provide knowledge and insights to local communities in multiple Indian languages. Meanwhile, there have been surprising developments like the disappearance of Google Earth's free archive of historical satellite imagery that helps scientists, students and researchers track and verify land use and land cover changes across the country.
Despite the use of multiple technology platforms, including drones, thermal cameras, camera traps, and sensors, the hardware components are still largely closed off, although this may change in the future as technologists work more closely with conservation groups.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: There have been reports of using facial recognition technology to prevent animal poaching. Will it work for animals?
Anita Arjundas: Any recognition technology relies on hours of data collection, and this is no less true for animal data. Collecting data over such a wide area makes it easier to identify animals with distinctive patterns. Over time, AI will improve the accuracy and speed of this effort, but it's important to be mindful of the potential for misuse of this technology, especially with regard to forest-dwelling communities' legitimate rights to access the ecosystems around their villages.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about ATREE’s work on engaging communities for conservation efforts and creating an online database.
Anita Arjundas: ATREE has a rich history of leveraging technology to build a database on India's biodiversity, identify patterns and processes, and prioritize landscapes and species for future efforts.
In the context of an online database, ATREE believes that open knowledge sharing to multiple stakeholders is crucial for biodiversity conservation, management and community engagement. We are currently in the final stages of developing the “Indian Plant Checklist”, a comprehensive database of around 15,000+ plant species curated by international experts.
ATREE’s Conservation Genetics Laboratory uses e-DNA analysis in a variety of ways, including mapping invasive alien fish species, assessing competition between wild and domesticated herbivores, and identifying impurity compounds and their levels in various foods and medicines.
ATREE researchers are actively integrating open access data to map ecosystem degradation and prioritize where to protect. Our plan is to use technology to define large-scale problems, prioritize where to spend scarce resources, monitor and manage activities on the ground, and most importantly, give communities access to data and information they can use.
For example, our scientists developed a mobile app that enables forest rights committee members to upload Community Forest Resource (CFR) claim boundaries as part of the CFR claim approval process. The app (Aamcho CFR Mapping) leverages publicly available maps and boundary information created by ATREE researchers through a web GIS platform. This, combined with on-the-ground capacity building, has led to community forest resource rights being recognized in over 55,000 hectares in India.
ATREE has been deeply engaged with communities in the Western Ghats, Kerala backwaters and Eastern Himalayas. This has given us novel and rich insights into the opportunities (e.g. crop cultivation patterns, wild and indigenous foods, medicinal plants) and challenges (e.g. invasive species, forest rights, land tenure) in these regions. We set out to build an information portal that is community friendly and locally sensitive. As we build this data portal, we will also explore how to add cutting edge AI based capabilities that support local languages and a chatbot type interface that will serve as a blueprint for other community focused and site specific portals under the Biodiversity Collaborative.
Why Anita Arjundas?
Anita Arjundas serves on the Board of Directors of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development and as an independent director on The Nature Conservancy's India Advisory Board.
She was involved in the establishment and running of Clare College from its formative stages. She previously served on the Steering Committee of the World Economic Forum's The Future of Urban Development and Services and facilitated the establishment of the Mahindra TERI Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Habitats, an open source research hub on energy and water efficiency.
