India faces unique challenges posed by its urbanisation trend. The research on India's Urbanscape will attempt to characterise urbanization from multiple perspectives. Notably, using satellite remote sensing to characterise urban growth. In addition, research on different facets like mobility, waste management, water and energy resources, governance and planning will be undertaken.
The evolution of human-social organization to live in large agglomerations – called urban areas, in the process of urbanization has posed new and complex challenges for planning and governance in meeting the necessary demands of infrastructure and amenities, while minimizing the implications on environment and resources. In the process of organic urbanization, despite the city-size distributions conforming to the scaling laws (Zipf’s law) resulting in hierarchical organization of societies, the urban primacy is continuously increasing. As a consequence, only a few cities are growing rapidly resulting in urban sprawl that is often unplanned and uncoordinated outgrowths beyond the geometrically laid out land-use plans and governed by idealized zoning regulations and building byelaws. Thus, cities self-organize and continuously adapt to find newer ways of managing its resources and meet the perpetually increasing demands.
Planning has until now restricted to preparation of idealized geometric land-use plans that grossly ignored the interactions among different sub-systems and the ensuing dynamics. Two key sub-systems that demand integration are land-use and transportation systems in forecasting future urban growth. Research on methods of modelling urban systems have now demonstrated agent-based modelling as one plausible approach that when combined with System Dynamics can offer a better understanding of the complex urban systems. Research at Gubbi Labs is focusing on building an integrated and comprehensive understanding of how cities evolve.
Gubbi Labs’ Project Ashoka – the Long-Term Ecological Research initiative to undertake biodiversity estimations with a citizen science interface. Under this, we are also making efforts to have proper data management practices.
Biodiversity estimates have been typically carried out mostly in protected areas for a long time now. However, there remains an un-estimated diversity outside forests or the non-protected areas which are mostly not sampled and estimated scientifically. Further, human dominated systems like farms, plantations, etc. are agro ecosystems that are more prone to manipulation. There exists very little information on the diversity in these ecosystems that has resulted in a situation where we don't know what we are losing.
Building on our larger research theme of ‘Biodiversity outside Forests’, Project Ashoka was conceived to address this with a significant citizen-science interface. The objective of the research is to initially estimate the biodiversity in the non-protected areas of south-central Deccan Plateau between the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats. The estimations would involve assessment of ants, amphibians, birds, butterflies, diatoms, fish, flora, and mammals.
Some key questions that the research aims to answer are:
In order to seek answers to these, Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) stations are being established in different locations. A small beginning has been made at Ashokavana, Bisle, Sakaleshpura taluk, Hassan district, Karnataka.
Going forward, such stations are planned in a few more locations in the Western Ghats. All these stations will function as LTER stations with a citizen science interface. Our team will work with locals and students in realising the goals of Project Ashoka in a collaborative engagement. All these stations will function as a monitoring station that will collect a host of ecological and biophysical information. This will double up with a weather station and habitat monitoring. The data will be shared on a curated portal. Eventually, the imagination is to transform these into information and outreach centers apart from being a LTER station that will have repositories of local ecological information. These stations will also have mechanisms for researchers from partner institutions to use the facilities and carry out their specific research.