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Kamal Bawa is the Founder-President of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), a globally renowned environmental think tank based in Bengaluru, which uses tech to tackle the challenges of biodiversity conservation.
From building open-source biodiversity data repositories to Decision Support Tools for managing Kyasanur forest disease (Monkey Fever), and to building a open-source GIS water accounting tool to mapping invasive plant species and fighting them to training civil society organisations on open source tools like Google Earth Engine, ATREE has integrated tech into its operations and activities in a large way.
A Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Bawa spoke to indianexpress.com on the role of tech in biodiversity conservation, the role of ATREE in conservation and restoration, and the need for technologists to engage with citizens to understand their needs and come up with relevant solutions. Edited excerpts:
Venkatesh Kannaiah: What is the role of technology in addressing major problems in biodiversity conservation and restoration?
Prof Kamal Bawa: Tech has been a double-edged sword when it comes to biodiversity. We have all seen how it has led to a growing and faster exploitation of the oceans. It has made it much easier and faster to mine large areas of the oceans. From one angle, it has been a destructive force. On the other hand, it has also led to new techniques to protect biodiversity on a large scale. It has led us to understand the issues in biodiversity with much greater intensity, say at a molecular level. Tech is neither good nor bad per se, but it can never be the only solution. We at ATREE feel that biodiversity conservation is not merely a tech issue but needs community engagement, encouraging citizen science and participation in facing the biodiversity challenges.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: What are the major challenges we face in India in conserving biodiversity?
Prof Kamal Bawa: Climate change is the biggest challenge and biodiversity provides us with the least expensive way to mitigate it. Perhaps an expanding population, inadequate planning, poor infrastructure, urban sprawl, and weak institutions are responsible for this poor state of affairs. We need to understand that we are just the guardians of our biodiversity and we need to pass on our natural heritage to our future generations.
Whether it be rivers, mountains, forests, wetlands, languages, cultures and traditions related to nature, when we take these collectively into account, we have a unique heritage, and this gives us a distinct identity, we can call it India or Bharat, it is unique and it is precious. We are biodiversity, and biodiversity is us. It is not just life forms, but what we represent. Biodiversity feeds us, nurtures us, protects us and provides us with spiritual enrichment.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about tech-related interventions in your area of work in India, which are having a significant impact?
Prof Kamal Bawa: Very interesting innovations are happening in the field of geospatial mapping. There are tools that are being built to understand wetlands, land forms, and help monitor the changes that are happening with regard to land use. These are also being done with LIDAR – Light detection and ranging, a remote sensing method that uses lasers to detect distances in the earth. There is also the extensive use of drones to map and study biodiversity ecosystems and hotspots.
Another interesting application of tech is in the field of DNA studies, where we can scoop up say a small sample from a lake and explore the DNA footprint of various species in detail. Now, there is so much advancement in the study of DNA footprints using these samples or faecal material with regards to the study of the composition of the various species, and its interaction with the ecosystem of the region.
A lot of work is happening using tech to understand, say the pollen from the bees, giving us an insight into the type of plants the bees are dependent on, and it helps us in documenting and cataloguing a large number of plants.
There is innovative work happening in the field of sensors, which monitor the movements of animals, which helps us track the kind and amount of interactions they have with people and their habitat.
Tech tools have a large role to play in building digital platforms in the field of biodiversity, either in terms of mapping or documentation, but also in the field of education and citizen science platforms..
The tech innovations in all these fields need to be linked to larger computer models that can generate a big picture about the state of our biodiversity, the structure and the interventions that are needed.
Perhaps, what we are waiting for is innovation in the field of restoration of soil quality and restoration of plant cover. I know that a lot of work is happening and I hope that we will see some results in the next 2-3 years. There is no certainly no plateauing of tech innovation in the field of biodiversity. Tech advancement per se is not the critical issue. The issue is one of how we use the technology or operationalise the innovation.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us some interesting tech interventions ATREE has been working on?
Prof Kamal Bawa: We use geospatial mapping to help us understand the ownership of land, and the prospects of regeneration of degraded land. We are also looking at using geospatial mapping to define land rights for indigenous communities, giving them some kind of status as landowners or land users, using some simple tech tools.
We use geospatial tech to document and catalogue the 16,000-18,000 species of plants in India. We are also building a Plants of India portal, which would be the most accurate database of plants in India. The portal will go live after a few months. We use molecular tools as well as field-based approaches to understand, conserve and manage diversity. We do it with the Plant Systematics Lab which engages with the research and documentation of plant biodiversity.
We have also been co-creating and seeding open-source biodiversity data repositories like the India Biodiversity Portal and the Karnataka Biodiversity Atlas.
We have developed a Decision Support Tool DST for managing Kyasanur forest disease (Monkey Fever) for the Government of Karnataka, in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
A free, open-source GIS water accounting tool — Jaltol — to help grassroots communities and decision-makers make water balance estimations in data-scarce environments has also been developed.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: What kind of work gets done at your ATREE labs?
Prof Kamal Bawa: Apart from the Plant Systematics Lab, we have an Insect Biosystematics Lab which uses the principles of population genetics to develop frameworks that support the integration of molecular data into the conservation and management of species.
The Ecoinformatics Lab uses ecological and environmental informatics to facilitate environmental conservation and trains researchers, and to become an open-access hub of environmental geospatial data.
The Freshwater Ecology Lab tackles projects in geoinformatics and ecology and the Water and Soil Lab works on projects aimed at lake restoration, implementing decentralised wastewater treatment systems and designing nature-based solutions.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How should research organisations incorporate citizen outreach into their activities? Has such outreach helped in better adoption of Tech?
Prof Kamal Bawa: One must understand that without a strong knowledge base, any outreach would have a limited impact. Organisations working on agriculture and natural resource management issues should keep themselves abreast of the current thinking and knowledge.
The issue is why some tech is adopted sooner, while some tech is not getting adopted at all..
Some of our tech interventions have a large citizen component, either as a citizen science initiative or with citizens as direct beneficiaries.
We have created a webGIS and a mobile app to help forest-dwelling communities and administrators file or view forest usage rights claims transparently. We have also used citizen science and collaborative mapping to estimate the extent of multiple invasive alien plant species.
Our partnership with Google Earth Outreach to train civil society organisations and practitioners on using open-source or open-access platforms and tools like the Google Earth Engine has been a huge success.
Our seven community conservation centres in various parts of India are a part of our engagement programme. It is like a kind of living lab. We gain as much knowledge as we give in these centres.
