Meghalaya

Fig 1: Physical map of Meghalaya, Northeastern India

A capacity building course on Freshwater Ecosystem Conservation in Northeastern India,  July 14-21, 2014 was organized by Shillong College, Meghalaya. Financial support for the course and biomonitoring initiative was provided by Rufford Foundation for Nature Conservation and Shillong College.  The GLOWS program at Florida International University and FERAL India contributed by sending resource persons as instructors for the course.  Participants included students and teachers from five local institutions, officers from the forest, pollution control, soil and water conservation departments and private organizations.

Course Schedule

The course has three components:

1. Ecohydrology: 3-day course presentations and water balance exercises are available here. A field trip was taken to Grace City to demonstrate stream discharge measurement, channel morphology, forested watersheds and sampling aquatic macroinvertebrates. Report is available here

 2. Geographic Information Systems: this was a 3 day hands-on course introducing students to GIS using the open source QGIS program; Data required for the course is available at http://www.feralindia.org/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=264. Remote sensing was also introduced to students via an exercise analysing the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) for different land covers on a map. For many students, this was the first time ever that they had actually worked with GIS, and being introduced to an open source GIS software, allows them to continue working with GIS. 

3. Biomonitoring: a  network has been created involving students and faculty from Shillong College, St.Anthony's College, St. Mary's College, Sankardev College and Lady Keene College, Assam University and the resource persons from Florida International University, Touro College South and Feral India.  The aim is to survey streams of Meghalaya to recognize the diversity of aquatic invertebrates that can then be used to form the basis of a program to infer water quality and catchment health. Biomonitoring thus gives a long-term picture of the health of a watershed, and is thus an extremely useful addition to physico-chemical monitoring of water quality. The initial plan is to sample streams twice a year (wet and dry seasons) for one year, to create an initial report and field guide to document invertebrates. Efforts will be made to identifiy invertebrates to the family and genus level.

Apart from an email distribution list, a FACEBOOK page has been set up at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1262897140511133/.

An Aquatic Macroinvertebrates of Meghalaya page has been set up with the India Biodiversity Portal. This page will be open to anyone to add in sightings data (photos/drawings, supplentary information such as water quality at  the time of sampling). Being georeferenced, an aquatic invertebrate sampling can be linked up with other information available at that site, such as vegetation, fauna, soil and climate.

Biomonitoring field trip at Grace City, Umsning, Meghalaya.

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K0fzgeM5-c&feature=em-upload_owner

Photos:

Media links:

http://meghalayatimes.info/index.php/front-page/26007-training-on-freshwater-ecosystem-conservation-in-north-east

http://www.theshillongtimes.com/2014/07/13/training-program-to-be-held/

Map Resources:

1. Geographical: there exist many useful online free datasets for creating maps. An example is the current Digital Elevation Model (ASTER 30m DEM) developed jointly by NASA and JSRO, that is available as a free download. This DEM can be used to make topographic maps that work very well on a large scale. Error in the DEM is within 20 m vertically and 30m horizontally. Below are two maps made from the DEM using GIS. This DEM can also be used in a GIS to delineate the watershed for a river, to identify regions ith steep slopes that have a higher chance of soil erosion ( and hence must be kept forested) and other useful terrain analysis.

Fig 2: An elevation map of southern Meghalaya showing the Cherrapunjee valleys. Created from the ASTER 30 Digital Elevation Model (NASA/JSRO) with an ESRI basemap for town locations. The DEM has a native vertical error of ~20 m; however spatial topographic patterns are preserved.