A city announces it planted a hundred thousand trees. A school announces its teaching method works. A building is called green. Almost none of it is ever checked. The Research Centre exists to check — starting with our own campus and our own students.
The centre began by doing something unglamorous and difficult: going out and counting trees, one at a time, with species, location, girth, canopy and condition recorded for each. Three surveys later, that work is finished.
The first survey, and the one that produced the method. Street and public trees mapped ward by ward, each tree geotagged and its condition recorded.
A biodiversity assessment of the airport and the land around it, covering more than forty thousand trees.
The first comprehensive street tree census of the city, carried out with partner organisations in Mysuru. More than one lakh seventeen thousand trees recorded.
The number of trees was the least interesting result.
Street tree diversity in both cities is closer to what you would predict for a rainforest than for a road.
A quiet risk: when a street is planted with one species, a single pest or disease can take out the whole street.
Trees with room for their roots grow measurably better — girth, height and canopy data show it plainly. It is a decision made by engineers, not gardeners.
It identifies which trees need care and which are genuinely dangerous. A falling tree becomes news; the benefit a standing tree provides has never been counted.
We know how to do this now, and doing it again for a fee would teach us nothing. Three things replace it.
A full manual — the software, how data was recorded, cleaned and assembled, what went wrong and what we would do differently — published so that any city, college or citizens' group can run its own census without hiring anyone.
A tool for recording trees in streets and public spaces, feeding a shared national database. The model is Cornell's bird recording app, which turned birdwatchers into the largest ecological monitoring network on Earth. There is no reason trees should be harder.
Once planting is added year on year, a department's claim can be checked against the record: what was planted, where, by whom, and how much of it is still alive. That is the difference between an announcement and an outcome.
If a method we teach turns out not to work, we publish that. A research centre that only reports its successes is doing publicity.Our standing commitment
We do not claim to be net zero. We are measuring how far from it we are — in our buildings, our water, our waste and what we consume — and building the next campus to close that gap. These are our own figures, from our own site.
Despite being the larger of the two.
Treated and returned to use on site rather than discharged.
Composted on site and returned to the grounds as manure.
Walls with jali work — the first construction of its kind in Mangaluru.
One micro weather station is running on campus. Nine more are planned, and where they go decides whether this is a weather feed or a piece of research.
Because we already know the canopy of every ward we surveyed, stations can be placed in matched pairs: two wards alike in density, road width, traffic and distance from the sea, differing mainly in how many trees they have. Run for a full year, including a complete monsoon, that produces something no Indian city currently has — measured evidence of what tree cover actually does to temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind at the street level where people live.
It is also the answer to the question every corporation asks and none can answer: not how many trees we have, but whether planting them changed anything.
The second long programme turns the same discipline inward. Teaching methods are usually adopted because they are fashionable, or because they worked somewhere else, and then never examined again.
We take practices already shown to work elsewhere, put them into our classrooms, and then measure whether they are actually helping the students in front of us. Where the data says no, the practice changes. No student should carry the cost of a method nobody checked.
The student coaching app is the instrument. Rather than telling a student to work harder, it uses what was taught, what was practised, what was scored and how the examination is weighted to recommend what to do today and tomorrow. Over years it also builds the record that makes long-term study possible — research that follows students across decades, not semesters.
Coming up: a conference on cognition in Mangaluru, October 2026.
Six researchers, led by Prof. Dr. Smitha Hegde. What is unusual about the team is where each of them came from: a neuroscientist now mapping groundwater, a wildlife biologist who tracked tigers now leading urban tree surveys, a mathematician trained in hypersonic flow now modelling how monsoon water moves through a city.
Collaborations, PhD enquiries and field volunteers: [email protected] · +91 99005 20233
CFAL Research Centre, Akashbhavan, Kavoor, Mangaluru 575015
