The highlight of the past month or so is that I met with my host supervisor, Niren in Mangalore. We had a great conversation about the project. During the conversation, he noted that the approach to calculating forest loss due to the widening of roads or laying new roads was not right. Currently, I am using a buffer approach where I am adding an appropriate buffer to the road alignment to calculate surface area lost. However, he pointed out that the roads were laid or widened in mountainous terrain and a buffer approach might not give us accurate results. A mountain road is constructed using a cut and fill approach, it is cut on one side and filled on the other side which increases the effective surface area lost when compared to the buffer approach.

He is very excited about the prospect of having cumulative forest loss statistics due to major linear infrastructure intrusion developments in the past 20 years. He wants to take the project one step further by applying for a grant for writing a good report about our findings. The plan is to then use this report to present to stakeholders and policymakers on the current and the future state of the Western Ghats within the Nethravathi River Basin. I am also excited about this and hope to not lose momentum the project has gained and continue to work on it till it reaches the report writing phase.

During the past month, I spent about a week digging into the literature on the cut and fill spatial analysis technique. However, due to time and resource constraints and the complicated approach that it is, we have decided to use a large enough buffer along the road alignment so that it would account for all the losses. Apart from this, I spent a considerable amount of time editing resume and writing cover letters to apply for jobs, more than a week tending to my back issues and a viral fever. Right now, I am trying to catch up on the lost time. While I had assumed, I had figured a way of separating out plantations and forests in my classification, I was not there yet. I spent the last few weeks in the trial and error mode. I feel like I am almost there now. I have also been working on road alignments for the fragmentation analysis task and getting my test data ready for the accuracy assessment. I will be spending the next few weeks generating various statistics and getting it reviewed by my host supervisor.

I will be flying back to Madison this Saturday. I hope to recover from the jetlag soon and get back to work!