NASA International Regional Scientific Meeting

NASA LCLUC Program

Focus on Water Resources

The International Regional Scientific Meeting of NASA LCLUC Programme is being hosted by Karunya University (Coimbatore), India during 10-14 January 2014. This event is jointly organized by the Monsoon  Asia  Integrated  Regional  Studies  Program (MAIRS), the Global Observation for Forest and LandCover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) Program, and the International System for Analysis Research and Training (START) Program.

The purpose of this international meeting is to provide an inter-agency and international forum to bring scientists together to discuss land-cover andland-use change (LCLUC) and its impacts, with a regional focus on South Asia.

The major five themes of the meeting are

1) agriculture and water resources;

2) biomass burning, including land-atmosphere interactions;

3) urbanization;

4) land use in coastal zones and estuaries; and

5) land use in mountains.

This international meeting will create a way for presenting the recent research accomplishments and state of the art on these themes and to come out with future research directions and application development needs. Also new opportunities for coordination and collaboration among research scientists and teams andongoing projects will be explored.

As a part of this, a preliminary Meeting has been arranged at CWRDM, Calicut (Kerala) on “LCLUC and water resources in coastal zones andWestern Ghats” during Jan 6-8, 2013. The International Regional Meeting at Karunya University will discuss LCLUC databases, agriculture and forest changedynamics, human dimensions and drivers of change, impacts, and predictive modeling of LCLUC change in South Asian Countries. A training workshop on“Geospatial tools to study LCLUC: Remote sensing, data, and products” has also been planned for early career scientists of the South Asia region. A poster session has been arranged to display the issues related to LCLUC in South Asia. 

The Meeting at Kaurnya University will have eight technical sessions dealing with agricultural landuse change, LCLUC related earth observations; atmospheric/landuse interactions; LCLUC and carbon cycle; LCLUC in mountainous areas; synthesis presentation of landuse in coastal zones and estuaries; and urban LCLUC. The Regional and National Priorities for LCLUC research in South Asia countries will be discussed in the panel session to formulate the GOFC-GOLD South Asia Regional Network (SARIN).

Around 80 international scientists from different parts of the world will be participating and presenting their research works in this meeting. Apart from that, Indian experts from Department of Science and Technology, National Remote Sensing Centre, Karunya University, Physical Research Laboratory, Indian Remote Sensing Centre, National Institute of Hydrology, National Crop Forecast Centre have been invited to share their experience on the above mentioned themes.