Reports, datasets and methods, released so they can be checked, reused and argued with. Including the results that did not go the way we expected.
Work carried out by the CFAL Research Centre. Each entry says plainly where it stands: published, in preparation, or under review.
More than one lakh seventeen thousand street trees recorded, each with species identification, location, girth, canopy classification and condition. The first census of its kind for the city.
The complete method, written so that a city, a college or a citizens' group can run its own census without hiring anyone. Survey protocol, the software used, how records were captured, cleaned and assembled, what failed the first time, and what we would do differently. Released free.
Assessment of the airport site and surrounding land. Conducted for the client; summary findings available on request.
Ward-by-ward mapping of street and public trees, with each tree geotagged and its condition recorded. Continues as AMARA, which adds new planting to the record each year so that planting claims can be checked against it.
Ten micro weather stations placed in matched pairs of wards — alike in density, road width, traffic and distance from the sea, differing mainly in canopy — measured against existing census data. The question is whether tree cover measurably changes temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind where people actually walk.
Whether teaching practices adopted from elsewhere measurably help the students in our own classrooms, tracked over years rather than terms. Findings will be published whether or not they support the practices we currently use.
From the completed surveys. Each is drawn from the reports above and can be checked against them.
Species diversity along roads in Mangaluru and Mysuru is closer to what you would predict for a rainforest than for a city street. This is not the picture urban planning assumes, and it changes what is worth protecting.
Heavy repetition of a small number of species is a quiet risk. A single pest or pathogen can remove an entire street, and the more uniform the planting the faster that happens.
Trees given room for their roots grow measurably better than trees in sealed pavements — visible in girth, height and canopy data. That outcome is set by engineers and contractors years before anyone plants anything.
The survey identifies which trees need care and which are genuinely hazardous. A tree that falls becomes news; the benefit of the ones still standing has never been counted at all.
It is worth being direct about the state of a two-year-old centre, because a page listing only achievements would tell you nothing.
The Research Centre has not yet published a peer-reviewed paper of its own. The first is in preparation. The cognition and micro-climate programmes have no results at all, because neither has run long enough to produce any, and reporting early findings from either would be worse than reporting nothing.
Where the Director's name appears on a hundred or more publications, those belong to her career before this centre and are listed separately below. Conflating the two would inflate what CFAL has done, and we would rather you could tell the difference.
Prof. Dr. Smitha Hegde has more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications and patents in plant biotechnology, across thirty-five years in botany and environmental biotechnology. This work was carried out at previous institutional appointments, with funding from BRNS, DST, UGC, VGST and BIAL. The expertise carries into the centre's work; the publications are not the centre's output.
Research areas: pteridology and fern biology of the Western Ghats, phytoremediation and heavy metal sequestration, molecular ecology, and evolutionary study of the LEAFY gene.
Licence. We intend to release reports and datasets under Creative Commons Attribution, so anyone may use, adapt and build on them provided the Research Centre is credited. Municipal bodies, students and citizens' groups are the intended users, and a licence that made them ask permission would defeat the purpose.
Requesting data. Datasets not yet posted can be requested directly. Tell us what you are trying to find out; it usually helps us give you something more useful than the raw file.
Corrections. If you find an error in anything here, write to us. Corrections will be published against the affected record rather than quietly applied.
research@cfal.in · +91 99005 20233 · CFAL Research Centre, Akashbhavan, Kavoor, Mangaluru 575015.
