A comprehensive account of the status of rattans found in the north-east region of India is presented here. Out of the 600 species found worldwide, a total of 20 species of rattan are found in North-East India. Rattan is inseparably attached with the tradition and culture of tribal people of the North-Eastern region. Since antiquity, people of this region have used to make many articles of dail...

The availability of nitrogen is one of the major limiting factors to crop growth. In the developed world, farmers use unsustainable levels of inorganic fertilisers to promote crop production. In contrast, in the developing world inorganic fertilisers are often not available and small-holder farmers suffer the resultant poor yields. Finding alternatives to inorganic fertilisers is critical for s...

Just because a method X converges faster than Y in theory, doesn’t mean that X is faster in practice, due to the strange world of modern computer architecture. Balancing mathematical and implementation issues is my goal. The problems I help solve should ideally be somehow useful to someone in an application domain. My mathematical background is reasonably good (in the sense of “oh I remember se...

Background: Companioned by economic development, a dietary shift toward higher meat consumption is seen in developing countries and transitional economies, where the demand for livestock production has been increasing in response to such a dietary shift. In the Asian Dryland Belt, approaches to meet this demand have focused on grazing intensification, cropland conversion for animal feed, and su...

Non-timber Forest Products (NTFPs), an important provisioning ecosystem services, are recognized for their contribution in rural livelihoods and forest conservation. Effective management through sustainable harvesting and market driven commercialization are two contrasting aspects that are bringing challenges in development of NTFPs sector. Identifying potential species having market value, con...

What is a ‘sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations?’ Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Although several aggregate indexes have been proposed to answer such questions, comprehensive and internationally comparable data are not available for most of these. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indexes of sustainability: the Wor...

High consumption of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is accompanied with a high yield of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Meanwhile, because the different types of resources have their own unique properties, the current content of each type will remain limited in a range of fluctuations. Therefore, WEEE recycling is an obvious choice to meet the resource demands of the...

Deltas are highly sensitive to increasing risks arising from local human activities, land subsidence, regional water management, global sea-level rise, and climate extremes. We quantified changing flood risk due to extreme events using an integrated set of global environmental, geophysical, and social indicators. Although risks are distributed across all levels of economic development, wealthy ...

Many computing systems are constrained by power budgets. While they could temporarily draw more power, doing so creates unsustainable temperatures and unwanted electricity consumption. Developing systems that operate within power budgets is a constrained optimization problem: configuring the components within the system to maximize performance while maintaining sustainable power consumption. Th...