We have utilized satellite images of 1975 and 2001 to reveal the slow response of glaciers to climatic warming in the Great Himalayan Range, Jammu and Kashmir, India. Correlation of various glacier morphometric parameters with reference to glacier area change and shift in the snout position revealed that morphometric parameters exert prime control on area changes over glaciers, but do not have much control on the snout retreat or advancement of glaciers. The

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing offers new and improved capabilities for vertical and structural characterization of objects, such as plant height and different growth stages/strata, etc. Climate change will change tree and plant growth conditions and thus will change forest structure and distribution, which can potentially be studied using LiDAR remote sensing.

Human-driven land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) is one of the most important causes for depletion of biodiversity. Few studies have been undertaken to spatially identify the natural areas prone to LULCC and hence biodiversity loss. This article describes a geospatial modelling technique using a combination of drivers of LULCC, spatial distribution
of LULCC and topographic impedances for change in hotspot. A study has been carried out to establish the model. The model has shown that the natural areas having high population density in the vicinity are highly prone to LULCC.

We study the regional variation of temperature trends (warming or cooling) over Western India and the contribution of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes towards this warming or cooling based on temperature datasets of 37 years (1973–2009). The contribution of LULC to the warming or cooling is estimated based on deviation in temperature in the observation and reanalysis datasets. The observed temperature dataset indicates that Western India is getting warmer by 0.13°C per decade. This warming is the combined effect of increase in concentration of greenhouse gases and LULC changes.

Pterocarpus santalinus L.f. (Red Sanders) is an endemic and endangered species largely confined to the southern portion of the Eastern Ghats, Andhra Pradesh, India. To understand its ecological and geographic distribution, we used ecological niche modelling (ENM) based on field sample-based distributional information, in relation to climatic and topographic datasets. Before modelling, hierarchical partitioning was used to optimize the choice of variables for better

The IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) described the Himalayan Region as data-deficient in terms of climate monitoring. This is a serious impediment to global research initiatives and thus necessitates long-term ecological monitoring (LTEM) across the Himalaya. Being governed by low temperature conditions, the high-altitude regions in Himalaya are more responsive to changing environmental conditions and hence serve as better indicators.

Characterization, quantification and monitoring of biodiversity have been among the major challenges in biodiversity conservation. Until recently, spatial ecological database in India was almost non-existent. There is need of a robust and quality database of the biological diversity at species, community, ecosystem and landscape levels for identification of vulnerable ecosystems and risk species. In order to have a national level database on the spatial distribution of

Sal (Shorea robusta Gaertn. f.) is a dominant tree species, whose natural range lies between 20–32°N lat. and 75–95°E long., is spread across 10 million ha in India. Species distribution models predict the species geographic ranges from occurrence records and sitespecific environmental data. Here, we have (i) generated the 1960s scenario for sal species on the basis of the existing published literature; (ii) confirmed the species occurrence data using satellite imagery for the

In the developing world climate change has far more ramifications than can be addressed by controlling just carbon
emissions. The developed world has stable populations and landscapes, and is thus affected mainly by the air which
spreads democratically without boundaries. On the other hand, the developing world with increasing populations and
consumption is depleting its living natural resource base of water, forest, soils and agriculture, and is poised for a far