Center for Environmental Sciences & Engineering

<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

<p>Land use/land cover (LULC) is a fundamental concept of the Earth's system intimately connected to many phases of the human and physical environment. Earth observation (EO) technology provides an informative source of data covering the entire globe in a spatial and spectral resolution appropriate to better and easier classify land cover than traditional or conventional methods. The use of high spatial and spectral resolution imagery from EO sensors has increased remarkably over the past decades, as more and more platforms are placed in orbit and new applications emerge in different disciplines. The aim of the present review work is to provide all-inclusive critical reflection on the state of the art in the use of EO technology in LULC mapping and change detection. The emphasis is placed on providing an overview of the different EO datasets, spatial-spectral-temporal characteristics of satellite data and classification approaches employed in land cover classification. The review concludes providing recommendations and remarks on what should be done in order to overcome hurdle faced using above-mentioned problems in LULC mapping. This also provides information on using classifier algorithms depending upon the data types and dependent on the regional ecosystems. One of the main messages of our review is that in future, there will be a need to assemble techniques specifically used in LULC with their merit and demerits that will enable more comprehensive understanding at regional or global scale and improve understanding between different land cover relationship and variability among them and these remains to be seen. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &amp; Francis Group.</p>

World University root node

Geocarto International

Land use/land cover in view of earth observation: data sources, input dimensions, and classifiers—a review of the state of the art

Abstract: N, S donor ligands (L1–L5){L1–L5 = 1,5-bis(4-chlorophenyl)-3-(thiophen-2-yl)-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole (L1), 1-(4-bromophenyl)-5-(4-chlorophenyl)-3-(thiophen-2-yl)-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole (L2), 5-(4-chlorophenyl)-3-(thiophen-2-yl)-1-(p-tolyl)-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole (L3), 5-(4-chlorophenyl)-1-(4-methoxyphenyl)-3-(thiophen-2-yl)-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole (L4), 5-(4-chlorophenyl)-1-(4-nitrophenyl)-3-(thiophen-2-yl)-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole (L5)} were synthesized by Claisen–Schmidt condensation and characterized by spectrometric methods. The complexes (I–V) were synthesized by ligand combination followed by metal chelation. The binding of the rhenium complexes to Herrin sperm DNA was monitored by UV spectroscopy and viscosity measurements. The groove binding was suggested as the most possible mode and the Kb values of the complexes were calculated. The mode of interaction was furthermore confirmed by molecular docking. Brine shrimp lethality and Saccharomyces cerevisiae cytotoxicity against the eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells showed the toxic nature of the synthesized compounds. All compounds were found active against S. cerevisiae, which was confirmed by increased ROS production and DNA damage as compared to untreated yeast cell culture. The oxidative harm to cell structures was affirmed by lipid peroxidation. An antimicrobial study was carried out by estimating minimum inhibitory concentration against two Gram-positive and three Gram-negative bacteria. All complexes show good antiproliferative activity against the HCT 116 cell line. All synthesized complexes are biologically more active than the corresponding ligands. Graphic abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]

Molecular Diversity

DNA interaction, in vivo and in vitro cytotoxicity, reactive oxygen species, lipid peroxidation of –N, S donor Re(I) metal complexes

Food industry is one of the fastest growing industry. With the development of varieties in this industry, the need for revenue management is vital. Revenue management is a technique to optimize the income by selling the right product to right customer at right time which is done by using data driven tactics and strategies. In this paper, a revenue management problem is formulated as multi-objective programming problem in an uncertain environment. As in real life situations most of the parameters are generally uncertain, therefore cost parameter considered as triangular fuzzy numbers. Fuzzy problem is converted into deterministic problem by alpha-cut method and then the algorithm is developed to solve the multi-objective linear programming problem to optimize revenue as well as cost simultaneously. To demonstrate and justify the formulated problem a numerical illustration has been considered and solved. All the mathematical problems are solved through an optimisation software LINGO-13.

Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management

Fuzzy multi-objective programming problem for revenue management in food industry

Biocontrol of Plant Diseases

Biocontrol of Rust and Leaf Spot Diseases*

Biodiversity loss in tropical forests is rapidly increasing, which directly influence the biomass and productivity of an ecosystem. In situ methods for species diversity assessment and biomass in synergy with hyperspectral data can adeptly serve this purpose and hence adopted in this study. Quadrat sampling was carried out in Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary (SWS), Gujarat, which was used to compute Shannon–Weiner Diversity Index (H′). Above ground biomass (AGB) was calculated measuring the Height and Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) of different trees in the sampling plots. Four spectral indices, namely Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Photochemical Reflectance Index (PRI), and Structure Insensitive Pigment Index (SIPI) were derived from the EO-1 Hyperion Data. Spearman and Pearson’s correlation analysis was performed to examine the relationship between H′, AGB and spectral indices. The best fit model was developed by establishing a relationship between H′ and AGB. Fifteen models were developed by performing multiple linear regression analysis using all possible combinations of spectral indices and H′ and their validation was performed by relating observed H′ with model predicted H′. Pearson’s correlation relation showed that SIPI has the best relationship with the H′. Model 15 with a combination of NDVI, PRI and SIPI was determined as the best model for retrieving H′ based on its statistics performance and hence was used for generating species diversity map of the study area. Power model showed the best relationship between AGB and H′, which was used for the development of AGB map. © 2020, International Society for Tropical Ecology.

Tropical Ecology

Synergetic use of in situ and hyperspectral data for mapping species diversity and above ground biomass in Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat

Block ramps are a cost-effective assembly in river restoration projects to sustain river morphology. This experimental study determines the various energy dissipation factors with uniform and non-uniform (NU) configuration of boulders, with the objective to translate the dissipation of excess energy in the flow to minimize river bed aggradation or degradation. Semi-hemispherical blocks of 5 sizes representing boulders in staggered pattern is adopted on 3ramp slopes as it was established that this arrangement is more effective in energy dissolution than the row or random arrangements. Energy dissipation increases as the spacing decreases for various sets of uniform arrangements. NU configuration of the boulders has been so far not investigated by previous researchers. This study incorporates experiments on the NU configuration and it was found that energy dissipation is greater in NU configuration than uniform arrangement in majority of the test conditions and that alternate spacing inherits the flow accordingly producing quantitative loss of energy due to increased localized energy dissipation. An empirical relation has been developed incorporating the uniform and non-uniform configurations for evaluating the relative energy dissipation, in terms of length of ramp, ramp height, critical flow depth, boulder concentration, and coefficients representing the relative boulder configuration. The relation is found to hold good within the ± 5% deviation and may be conservatively used for formulation of design guidelines that can aid water resources engineers in practical applications of boulder block ramps for stream restoration works. © 2020 22nd Congress of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research-Asia Pacific Division, IAHR-APD 2020: "Creating Resilience to Water-Related Challenges". All rights reserved.

22nd Congress of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research-Asia Pacific Division, IAHR-APD 2020: "Creating Resilience to Water-Related Challenges"

Adaptive uniform and non-uniform configuration of boulders on block ramps for river restoration

An Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) system, with digital signal processing has been used to measure the longitudinal, transverse, and vertical velocity components in three‐dimensional, fully developed open‐channel flow with transversely placed Piano Key Weir (PKW). Simple experiments were conducted to deduce the influence of boundaries on noise occurrence. Both the longitudinal boundary (PKW) and vertical boundary (channel bed) affect noise. Magnitude of noise has been found to be increasing near both the boundaries. Consequences of noise on the first- and second-order velocity parameters have also been estimated. Results show that there is existence of higher correlation between noise and second-order velocity (turbulence) than first-order velocity. After the noise removal from the data-sets, the reduction in the magnitude for the second-order velocity is found up to 80%. Magnitude of reduction is also dependent on the distance from the hydraulic structure. Analyses of data-sets in the horizontal plane indicate presence of noise (i.e. higher uncertainty) below the relative depth 0.3. Where, relative depth is defined as the ratio of point depth of measurement to total flow depth. © 2018, © 2018 Indian Society for Hydraulics.

ISH Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

Noise in the velocity measurements and boundaries effect in an open channel with Piano Key Weir

Mangrove forest coastal ecosystems contain significant amount of carbon stocks and contribute to approximately 15\% of the total carbon sequestered in ocean sediments. The present study aims at exploring the ability of Earth Observation EO-1 Hyperion hyperspectral sensor in estimating aboveground carbon stocks in mangrove forests. Bhitarkanika mangrove forest has been used as case study, where field measurements of the biomass and carbon were acquired simultaneously with the satellite data. The spatial distribution of most dominant mangrove species was identified using the Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) classifier, which was implemented using the spectral profiles extracted from the hyperspectral data. SAM performed well, identifying the total area that each of the major species covers (overall kappa = 0.81). From the hyperspectral images, the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index) were applied to assess the carbon stocks of the various species using machine learning (Linear, Polynomial, Logarithmic, Radial Basis Function (RBF), and Sigmoidal Function) models. NDVI and EVI is generated using covariance matrix based band selection algorithm. All the five machine learning models were tested between the carbon measured in the field sampling and the carbon estimated by the vegetation indices NDVI and EVI was satisfactory (Pearson correlation coefficient, R, of 86.98\% for EVI and of 84.1\% for NDVI), with the RBF model showing the best results in comparison to other models. As such, the aboveground carbon stocks for species-wise mangrove for the study area was estimated. Our study findings confirm that hyperspectral images such as those from Hyperion can be used to perform species-wise mangrove analysis and assess the carbon stocks with satisfactory accuracy. © 2020 by the authors.

Fulltext

Remote Sensing

Use of hyperion for mangrove forest carbon stock assessment in bhitarkanika forest reserve: A contribution towards blue carbon initiative

Hyperspectral acquisition provides the spectral response in narrow and continuous spectral channel. The high number of contiguous bands in hyperspectral remote sensing provides significant improvements in assessing subtle changes as compared to the multispectral satellite datasets in context of spectral resolution. Therefore, the main goal of the present research is to evaluate the sensitivity of the artificial neural networks (ANNs) for chlorophyll prediction in the winter wheat crop using different hyperspectral spectral indices. For evaluating relative variable significance in the study, the Olden’s function has been applied. The Lek’s profile method is used for sensitivity analysis of ANNs for chlorophyll prediction using the vegetation indices such as Red Edge Inflection Point (REIP), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), and Structure-Insensitive Pigment Index (SIPI) derived from hyperspectral radiometer. The analysis indicates a high sensitivity of SAVI followed by NDVI, REIP and SIPI for chlorophyll retrieval using ANNs. The statistical performance indices obtained from calibration (RMSE = 0.27; index of agreement = 0.96) and validation (RMSE = 0.66; index of agreement = 0.83) suggested that the ANN model is appropriate for chlorophyll prediction with good efficiency. The outcome of this work can be used by upcoming hyperspectral missions such as Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) and Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) for large-scale estimation of chlorophyll and could help in the real-time monitoring of crop health status. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.

Environment, Development and Sustainability

Sensitivity analysis of artificial neural network for chlorophyll prediction using hyperspectral data

Turbulent structures of flow around the mid-channel braid bar have not been adequately investigated so far. Of late, the intrinsic fluvial hydraulics associated with the formation of braided rivers interspersed with sand bars have been vital topics of research. In this paper, the findings yielded from a research foray on the aforementioned underlying processes are presented. For obtaining the requisite experimental data, the three-dimensional flow velocity components are measured with the help of acoustic Doppler velocimetry (ADV) and these velocity data are analyzed using quadrant bursting techniques. The flow characteristics are greatly affected by the presence of a mid-channel bar. The depth-averaged contours of turbulent parameters are analyzed in the present study. Herein, the hole size concept is adopted for separating the bursting events. The effect of hole size on the quadrant events is also studied. The experiments are performed for different submergence ratios. A new parameter, Bursting Index (BI), is proposed in this research to reflect a quantitative measure of the turbulent bursting effect on streambed elevation changes. The parameter BI is the ratio of the odd event occurrence probability to the even event occurrence probability. The high values of correlation coefficients signify that the BI is profoundly influenced by streambed elevation changes, which makes it an ideal parameter for analyzing scour and deposition phenomena in real-life water management projects. The prime focus on performing the experiments has been to analyze the impact of bar height on flow structure in the vicinity of the mid-channel bar. © 2020 IWA Publishing. All rights reserved.