BNHS launches Indo-US eMammal project at Amboli KOLHAPUR: An Indo-US project aimed at involving people in understanding the environment using sophisticated technology has been launched at Amboli, a hill station in Sindhudurg district, bordering Kolhapur. The project, eMammal International, is funded by the US Department of States bureau of educational and cultural affairs and the Bombay National History Society (BNHS) is implementing the project in India with the help of American Alliance of Museums and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, US. The project will also be implemented in Pawni village in Nagpur district and in the Konkan areas, most probably in Ratnagiri district. The project aims at creating a pool of 1,000 students, teachers and people in the villages, connecting them with the international community and training them to assist each other to understand the environment, collect photographs of animals and changes in the localities and get shared information about the mammals. It involves high-quality camera traps in the vicinity of the selected village, which will be operated by the local students, who will upload the photographs to a website hosted in the US and share the information related to the photographs. The BNHS conducted a three-day training session at Amboli and also tied up with local Malabar nature conservation club and Union English School, Amboli to implement the project. Around 250 students and teachers had participated in the training, which ended on Tuesday. Its a unique project bringing technology to the people to conserve the nature. We have trained the local people how to use a camera trap, how to download the photos to the laptop and upload it on the website. These high-quality cameras can store 16GB data or around 15,000 photos for 15 days. We have asked the students to replace the card every 15 days so that they could see their environment from different perspectives, said Rahul Khot, curator at the BNHS and the Indian co-ordinator for the e-Mammal project. Sanjay Karkare, another curator at the BNHS, who had participated in training the students and teachers at Amboli, said that the locations for the eMammal project were selected considering their rich biodiversity. Amboli is in the Western Ghats while Pawni is near Pench tiger reserve. These two areas have different flora and fauna and have a variety of mammals. While training locals at Amboli, we installed a camera trap for 12 hours at night and captured two wild animals. When we showed the photos to the participants, they were excited since they were less aware of the animals behavior in the open, Karkare said. Link:- timesofindia.indiatimes/city/kolhapur/BNHS-launches-Indo-US-eMammal-project-at-Amboli/articleshow/45569204.cms
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 10:05:25 +0000
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