Nature Hub

  From BBC News   By-  Kamala Thiagarajan   Edited by - Amal Udawatta Sai Krishan, Thirunelly Tribal Special Intervention Programme Lakshmi and Shantha with a species of tuber locally called the Noorang (Credit: Sai Krishan, Thirunelly Tribal Special Intervention Programme) In a tribe in southern India, a group of women are working hard to revive the country's ancient native tubers, and bring them back into everyday culture. Lakshmi spends several hours each day digging out large lumpy and hairy yam tubers, starchy roots that grow below the soil. Some weigh an unwieldy 5kg (11lb) and are 4.5ft-long (1.4m), almost as tall as she is. It's painstaking work, says 58-year-old Lakshmi, who goes by one name. First, she has to cut out the thick shoot above the ground. Then, she uses shovels to dig up the earth around the buried stem and a paddle-like flat chisel to gently pry out the tuber. She uses her hands to dig the tuber out of the ground to avoid damaging its delicate...

 From Sci Div Net By - Sanjeet Bagcchi Edited by Vinuri Randhula Silva, A Bangladeshi farmer transplants rice. Underground reservoirs are being tapped to supply smallholder farms in Bangladesh. Copyright:  International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)   (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) . This image has been cropped. , . . [NEW DELHI] The pumping up of groundwater by Bangladesh’s 16 million smallholder farmers has led to a massive storage capture of underground reservoirs rivalling the storage capacity of the world’s large dams, according to a study . Published in   Science,   the   study   said that groundwater-fed irrigation had transformed much of Bangladesh’s single-crop, rain-watered floodplains into highly productive double-cropping and, in places, triple-cropping lands to make the country the world’s fourth highest producer of rice. The researchers say the  sustainable  irrigation process could be replicated in other areas affected by the impacts of...

                 From - Mongabay Magazine,                By-     Joanik Bellalou  ,               Edited by - Amal Udawatta,            Tea leaves from the Bluefield tea plantations are handpicked during              weekdays. A lack of fertilizers means fewer trips into the fields for                 the workers, as the tea plants now take longer to grow. Image by                  Joanik Bellalou In April 2021, then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa abruptly banned imports of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, in an attempt to preserve Sri Lanka’s fast-depleting foreign currency reserves. The government sold it as a shift to organic agriculture that would make Sri Lanka the world’s firs...

  By Helen Briggs, Environment correspondent, Edited by -Amal Udawatta, From all the pictures of parched fields, dusty soil and dried-up reservoirs, it might appear obvious there's a drought. But from a scientific point of view, it's more complicated than that. There's no one definition of drought - it's different depending on whether you look at weather, agriculture or water flow in rivers and streams. And when it comes to declaring an "official" drought, government agencies look at how the long dry spell is affecting food production, water supplies and the environment. That includes how much rivers and streams are shrinking, which puts wildlife and water supplies at risk. They also look at threats to crops and livestock if fields are turned into dust bowls. How water supply is affected One big indicator for drought is hydrology - the flow of water through rivers and the state of the water stored underground in permeable rocks beneath the soil. These are cruc...