Answering the question - Why water is special?

ATREE organized a 12-day management Development Programme in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) from 2-12th December 2018. The programme was held at the School of Ancient Wisdom at Devanahalli, Bangalore.

The inaugural function was graced by Chief Guest, Shri B. G. Gurupadswamy (Engineer's Chief and Registrar, ACIWRM) who spoke about the importance of an integrated approach to water management in the contemporary world. Dr Ravi Prakash (Technical) Director, ACIWRM, re-emphasized the need for the trainees to become inter-disciplinary and to look at the big-picture as they grow in their professional life. Dr Veena Srinivasan presented ATREE's work on water and also delivered the first lecture of the training programme by contextualising the question - why water is special? - setting the stage for the rest of the training programme.

The first two talks in the SUBMERGE talk series were by ATREE faculty. They addressed water from different perspectives; on Dec 15, Jagdish Krishnaswamy delivered the inaugural talk on "Why does a river need to flow from mountains to the sea?". On Dec 17, Veena Srinivasan presented a talk titled "New Frontiers in Water Sciences". 

Organised in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Science,  the talks were followed by an in-depth closed-door tutorial session with 10-20 young scholars and practitioners from across Bangalore.

Data collection is an important part of any research activity. The process of formulating data schema, collecting data, compiling the collected data, management and analysis of such data can be done efficiently by leveraging mobile data collection techniques. Visualization and interpretation of such data can be done using tools like Earth Engine. The workshop introduced a well known open-source mobile data collection platform popularly known as Open Data Kit(ODK) suite of tools and Google suite of tools. 

Participants were also introduced to Google Earth Engine (GEE), a powerful and freely accessible cloud computing geospatial analysis platform which makes available satellite imagery and large scale datasets to detect Earth surface changes and map trends. Participants practiced downloading and visualizing different kinds of raw and processed datasets and classifying land cover images.

A 2-day workshop on Science Communication at ATREE began with Arun Dayanandan, Conservation Biologist and Science Communicator introducing the participants to storytelling, blogging and writing. 

In the latter half of the day, participants were introduced to several open-source software for photo and video editing. They interviewed faculty and post-docs at ATREE and made short documentaries to communicate the work of these experts. Day 2 focussed on technical aspects such as open-source editing tools and other easily available but little know video software that boost quality.