^{An aerial view of the Tungabhadra dam in Karnataka [Image Credits: Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay]}

As winter sets in over Punjab, one can hear the humdrum of hundreds of machines harvesting rice across lakhs of hectares of paddy fields. In Maharashtra, villages in Vidarbha lug their snowy cotton harvest to the market. Years ago, these landscapes were a sprawling array of forests, grasslands, wetlands and multiple crops cultivated on a shifting basis.

Mud snails, also known as mystery snails, live in freshwater and belong to a snail family called Viviparidae. They are found throughout the world except in South America and Antarctica. Such globally distributed species incite interesting questions about their dispersal across different continents. In a recent study, researchers in Bengaluru from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), investigated manifestation of these mystery snails in India.

Researchers from two Bengaluru-based institutes—the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), have studied the distribution and the impact of protected marine areas on Bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum) in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. After months of data collection by scuba diving and capturing underwater photographs of the seafloor, their findings have now been published in the journal Oryx.

Study from the Ashoka Trust from Research in Ecology and the Environment details the importance of a global standard to curb the adulteration of herbal medicines.

Researchers from ATREE study the factors affecting the farmer's choice of crops and the impact on water resources in the Arkavathy river basin.

In a recent article published in the `Science’ magazine, titled ‘When the cure kills—CBD limits biodiversity research’, researchers have questioned the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a framework formulated to conserve biodiversity. 

Dr Veena Srinivasan, who leads the Water, Land and Society Programme at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru, has been appointed to the Prince Claus Chair at Utrecht University, Netherlands. A doctorate from Stanford University, Dr Srinivasan has been named to the International Development Studies Research Centre in the Department of Human Geography and Planning at the university.

An international team of researchers use a multi-pronged approach to understand the diveristy in tree communities.

The Vembanad lake in Alappuzha, Kerala, has developed a unique ecosystem due to different laws. The Vembanad Fish Count is a citizen science initiative that helps study the diveristy of fish in this Ramsar site.