The visit north was fantastic and just what we all needed after so much time in the city. May is peak tourist-season in the hills because it's right before the monsoon rains start and most Indians are on summer holidays. Somewhat unfortunately for us, the rains (tho not the monsoons) came early this year and although we saw a bit of sun we didn't see much while there. No worries. We've been in the sun and heat for months on end now and no Volcano-raised person can be entirely comfortable without feeling the rain every now-and-then.
Misty Darjeeling forest
We are just back from a three-week trip to Darjeeling (to visit ATREE fieldsites) and Sikkim (for a family trek).
The visit north was fantastic and just what we all needed after so much time in the city. May is peak tourist-season in the hills because it's right before the monsoon rains start and most Indians are on summer holidays. Somewhat unfortunately for us, the rains (tho not the monsoons) came early this year and although we saw a bit of sun we didn't see much while there. No worries. We've been in the sun and heat for months on end now and no Volcano-raised person can be entirely comfortable without feeling the rain every now-and-then.
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MM Hills villages; purple = high elevation (1,000+m), cyan = low (400m) I've been working on visualizing the sites I worked in. Didn't think to get my GIS site license updated before leaving so that left me in a bit of a quandary. Especially when it came to finding the underlying data files for the GPS locations. But I finally figured out how to find elevation data and more. Here's a look at my sites (each point labeled with the village it is in) color-coded for elevation. Turns out the villages weren't at the elevations I thought they would be when I started the study (will be analyzing data a little differently now) but, that's why you collect data. The cyan sites labeled "forest" are the areas where they take cattle to graze for much of the year. If you have Google Earth on your computer and you want to look at the sites with a little more detail, open this file:
Kalani & Tim taking the boat to our hotel room Last month was the South & Central Asia Fulbright conference. It was pretty cool -- a week at a swank hotel in Kerala getting to hear about a lot of cool projects. I got enough data analyzed ahead of time to be able to say something semi-intelligent for my talk, and my talk was on the first full day which meant I could be relaxed and just listen to what everyone else was saying the rest of the time. Oooh, I have data! Nagendra finished entering the interviews for me and I now have a 66 x 2,366 worksheet full of data. Not all those cells are useful (I set the worksheet up to be easy to enter accurately, but not easy to work with afterwards) but, still, I have data.
What I don't have is a Stats program. Didn't think about the fact that it was on my office desktop, not my laptop (not to mention that the license has probably expired anyway). Now to figure out what to do with it all..... Yesterday Tim took me to the office on the back of his bike. There are definite advantages of going on the bike, first and foremost being that although it takes over 2 hours to go from my door to the ATREE offices by bus, it's a mere 40 minutes or so on a motorcycle.
Starting my talk I was invited to give the Inaugural Address at the National Conference on Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity at Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu last week. At first they asked for a 90 minute talk (!) but then dropped it to 45 minutes a few weeks ahead of the conference. Since the conference was happening right before a 3-day weekend (Id-Milad) we decided to all go then spend a couple nights in a nearby Hill Station in the Eastern Ghats afterwards. Taking a GPS point in Arewala While both kids were on their class trips, Tim and I headed out to MM Hills with Nagendra to get GPS points for each village and also to go see a cattle camp. It was a whirlwind trip with visits to all 9 of the villages I'm working in over a 4-day period. Nagendra has almost finished all the interviews (he had about 4 left to do in some of the upper-elevation villages plus we decided to drop one of the low-elevation villages and selected a new village, closer to the Reserve, on this trip, so that's another 10). The visit was good. We started off with a visit to Siddappa's parents who live in a village on the way to MM Hills. They were very sweet and hospitable and we got to drink fresh milk from their cows, eat rice from their paddies, and sambar and peanuts from their fields. I felt honored. Did you just get home from your daily commute, got out of the car in which you drove alone to work, preheated your oven for dinner, removed a cold beverage from your refrigerator, and turned on your computer to see what's new with the world? If so, like all the rest of us Americans, you should not be holding your head very high at this moment. I have just returned from Mumbai (Bombay, for those of you still using the British city names) where I was an invited speaker (Resource Person, they called me) at the Nagindas Khandwala College International Seminar on Society, Politics and Climate Change. It was a great experience, Indian to the core but strangely reminiscent of conferences in Hawaii. And I can clearly say, Indians do not appreciate the carbon production and lack of responsibility for it that they see coming from the U.S.
First interview From the 7th - 9th of November I made my first data-collection trip to the field. Since my last trip (end of Sept), I've been working with Siddappa Setty at ATREE to finalize a research plan that allows me to work in a site (MM Hills) 6 hours from home but still get to see my family (for awhile there I was thinking either no research, or take the kids out of school, or only see my family a few days a week). We've come up with a survey-based study to look at agricultural crops, trees, and use of forest for livestock and food items. I will come and go from MM Hills but the majority of the interviews will be conducted by Nagendra who is from BRT and has worked extensively with ATREE. Although I'd really like to be actually taking all the data myself, this seems like a good compromise between family and research and I think it will all turn out well. Our hotel room in MM Hills After our quick trip to BRT we drove back out to the sorta-main road, then out to the other side of the same range of hills to a village called Male Mahadeswaram Hills (MM Hills for short). I was surprised as we drove into town at how big it is. But, like BRT, it houses an important temple and is visited by many pilgrims. We arrived pretty late in the day and were met by Mr. Narayanan, the ATREE representative in that area. He helped us check into our hotel and showed us where we could get supper, then arranged to meet us the next day to show us around. |
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