Tag: preserving

Preserving Natural Heritage

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With 60000 specimens, the 51-year-old Kashmir University Herbarium (KASH) is the only address for studying the diverse plant basket of Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh. In near future, it is planning to get digitized, reports Insha Shirazi
Mrs and Mr Dr Ralph R Stewart, the last major botanist who immensely contributed to the taxonomy in Kashmir.
It has been a phenomenal growth. The Kashmir University Herbarium, founded in 1972 by AR Naqshi with a meagre collection of 500 species in a single room, has now blossomed into a haven of Himalayan plant specimens with a staggering 60,000 plant specimens. Known globally for its unique and endemic plant diversity, the herbarium is a magnet for plant enthusiasts and researchers. As early as 1980, the Herbarium was recognised by the International Bureau for Plant Taxonomy and Nomenclature based in New York, under the acronym KASH. Housed in the University’s Centre for Biodiversity and Taxonomy (CBT), it had only 12,000 plant specimens, then. In the last four decades, the collects have gone up five times.
Index Herbarium puts this herbarium and rank three in the North-Western Himalayas of India. Although Central National Herbarium, Kolkata is home to more than 200000 plant specimens and Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, and IIIM of Jammu have more than 12000 plant specimens each, none of these major herbariums has a collection as diverse and unique as that of the Kashmir University Herbarium.
Professionals associated with the herbarium have collected the plant species from diverse habitats across Jammu and Kashmir. It has plants that grow in Guraze, Tulail, Karnah, Keran, Badherwah, Doda, Kishtwar, Warwun, Marwah, Dachin, Padder, Rajouri, Poonch, Drass, Kargil, Zanskar, and Nubra. Part of the collection was sent to renowned herbaria including the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew, besides various others within India.
The Preservation
“Herbarium is a dried plant specimen collected through different techniques. We go to the field and collect them, dry them in newspapers or blotting paper, depending on the moisture content,” Akhtar H Malik, Junior Scientist and Curator for Biodiversity and Taxonomy (CBT) at the Kashmir University Herbarium (KASH), said while explaining the process of collecting and preserving plant specimens. “After drying, we paste these specimens on specialized sheets called herbarium sheets, which have an international standard size of 29×41.5 cm. On the bottom side of the plant specimen, we paste a special label known as the herbarium label that has data like the spot where it was collected, location, date, habitat, etc. After that, we transfer these plant specimens to the herbarium and arrange them according to the Bentham and Hooker systems. Nowadays, we arrange them in herbarium compactors according to the family of the plant specimens.”
However, preserving these plant specimens for long-term storage requires more care. “We use chemicals to preserve these plant specimens at the time of pasting on specialized Herbarium sheet. Then, the second step is to use a small amount of mercuric chloride with glue because plants that we collect from different places, such as aquatic bodies, can be contaminated by pests. After that, we keep them in fumigation chambers with chemicals like Para dichlorobenzene and naphthalene for 10 days until these chemicals are exposed. Finally, we transfer them to herbarium compactors.” Malik added.
These plant specimens last for a long time. “We have species that are more than 100 years old, collected by British botanists from Kashmir,” Malik said. “They collected a lot of specimens from the Himalayas of Kashmir and kept those specimens in Dehradun. We obtained 10 specimens from them and kept them in our Herbarium.”

These plant specimens are not only important for scientific research but also for education and cultural heritage. “Every year we get students from schools, colleges, and Universities. If this herbarium would not be there a researcher or student might have to go to another place to submit their specimen,” Malik said.
The Importance
KASH (Kashmir University Herbarium) holds a huge collection and has emerged as a valuable resource for identifying unknown and rare plant species.
“We have specimens of Kuth (Saussurea costus) and Kahzaban (Arnebia benthamii) that identify the genuine from similar plants, said Malik. “These specimens are not only useful for researchers and scholars but also for students who visit our herbarium to learn about plant diversity.”
The curator at KASH Herbarium at the University of Kashmir explains things to visitors. KL Image Special Arrangement
Herbariums are crucial for documenting plant diversity. “We can create a flora or inventory of plant species based on herbarium data. We can also determine the location of a particular plant species with the help of herbarium specimens,” added Malik.
Off late, KASH has also become a popular destination for students, scholars, and researchers from different colleges, schools, and universities. Besides, Herbariums represent Kashmir’s natural heritage of plants.
Climate Change
The herbarium can be used as a tool to determine how the phenology of plants changes due to climate change. Now, some plants flower in February. “We can take historical data from the Herbarium of these plants whose flowering was preponing, by one month,” Malik said. “The collectors collected these plants for the herbarium when the flowering was seen in March but now it is February. It clearly explains the climate change impact.”
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has declared at least six medicinal and aromatic plant species on the red list of extinction in Jammu and Kashmir. “We can do mapping of extinct plants. We write the herbaria data of the plant specimens, location, its geo coordinates and make a map about their distribution range then and now,” Malik said. “Suppose we have 50 locations in herbarium specimens but on the ground, we can locate 10 or 15 locations and we go for their In-situ conservation.”
The data on medicinal plants in the herbarium is collected by scholars from different locations of Kashmir like Gulmarg, Kokernag, and Daksum.. When they go to collect the specimens after 30 years and fail to locate the particular specimen, it reflects a shift in climate change, land use patterns, population expansion, habitat fragmentation or any other reason.
A Rich Collection
“I have visited the KASH 8-10 times. In comparison to established herbaria, it is an active herbarium of northwestern Himalaya and houses a rich collection of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh regions. This has a collection of very remote areas which are not found in any other herbariums,” Dr Priyanka, Principal Scientist CSIR, National Botanical Researcher Institute Lucknow (NBRI) said. “If we want to study plant diversity of Jammu and Kashmir and Himalayan you can sit in Kashmir University herbarium and compile a lot of data on plant diversity.”
Priyanka is working on the Himalayas. Though the Herbarium of Kolkata has an almost 200 years old collection, the specimens are not in good condition.
“My 20 students have visited KASH because it is mandatory. It is important for Kashmir and Ladakh flora as they are representing a good amount of plant diversity in India,” Priyanka said. “The main collectors of the KASH are well-renowned taxonomists. The specimens are well-identified and well-researched and represent the Standard reference diversity.”
Plant Collectors In Kashmir
Improvement
With technology shifts in knowledge management, KASH is also changing. “We will go for digitization of all the specimens and we have submitted the proposal also,” Malik said. “We can use a high-end digital scanner and can scan the specimens and we can keep all those scanned images of all the plant specimens on the website by which the student and scholars across the world can asses those scanned images of plant specimens at home. It will take 3-4 years to execute this plan.”
The Financial Assistance for Science and Technology (FIST) grants the Kashmir University herbarium 10 lakh rupees for the herbarium compactors.
“Many herbariums in India and outside India have digitized their herbariums. If the herbarium of Kashmir gets digitized it would be the very fantastic job and it will be very useful for the researcher from outside Kashmir to assess the plant specimens sitting at the home. It will save time and money,” Dr Priyanka said.

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( With inputs from : kashmirlife.net )

April 29, 2023
Mumbai woman held for killing mom, preserving chopped body pieces at home: Police

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Mumbai: A 55-year-old woman was murdered and her body chopped into pieces which were found dumped in the cupboard and water tank in her house in Mumbai, following which police arrested her 23-year-old daughter, an official said on Wednesday.
As per the preliminary investigation, the woman was killed in December 2022, and her body parts are being preserved in her house since then, a senior police officer said without elaborating.
When asked how the body parts were preserved for such a long period and how the accused could have got rid of the foul smell, he said these aspects are being investigated.
While some parts of the highly-decomposed body were found wrapped in a plastic bag kept inside the cupboard of her tenement in Lalbaug area, other parts were found dumped in a water tank, a police official said.
He said the daughter of the woman was found sitting inside the room when police knocked on her door on Tuesday night.
The official said a relative of the woman had gone to the house of the deceased but found the door locked from the inside. The relative grew suspicious due to the foul smell and informed the police.
Police are awaiting a postmortem report and investigating the crime, the official said, adding a case of murder was registered.
“Prima facie, the woman was killed by her daughter in December 2022. If we assume that she severed the body parts at that time, it means she has been staying with the body parts for at least three months. We are trying to find out the motive,” the senior officer added.

(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 15, 2023
Ukrainian composer Heinali on preserving the sound of Kyiv: ‘I wanted to protect my city from harm’

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The latest album by Heinali is a rather beautiful piece created from field recordings made around his home city – recordings from rail stations, the sound of traffic and birdsong, the dripping of water in a tunnel, the rumbling of trains on a track, the babble of voices in a shopping mall – all sliced up, manipulated, accompanied by synthesisers and transformed into a piece of compelling ambient music. What transforms this niche arthouse project into an urgent piece of work is the fact that the city in question is Kyiv. “These are recordings of a world that has disappeared,” says Heinali, AKA Ukrainian musician Oleh Shpudeiko. “The album documents a city that has changed for ever.”
The album, Kyiv Eternal, was completed after the Russian invasion, but the project dates back more than a decade. “I bought myself a handheld digital tape recorder in 2012 and started to record sounds around Kyiv,” says Shpudeiko. “I had hundreds of these sound sketches on my hard drive when I had to flee the city in February last year.”
He relocated to Lviv while the battle of Kyiv raged in the early months of the war, and briefly returned after the Russian army’s advances were successfully repelled. “Kyiv was more alive than ever, but I wanted to protect it from harm, to console it,” he says. “This was a city where I had spent 37 years of my life. So this album became a hymn to this part of my identity.”
Heinali: Kyiv Eternal – stream Spotify
Shpudeiko describes the audio loops he works with as “memory loops”. He explains: “When we remember things, we only remember certain parts. We might change parts of that memory in our brain: we’ll add or remove or amplify a piece of information. It is very similar to a musical loop. A fragment performed over and over again will change slightly with each repetition.”
Kyiv Eternal is released exactly a year after the Russian invasion, and comes not long after the release of another Heinali album, Live From a Bomb Shelter in Ukraine, which documents a performance live-streamed from a Lviv basement as Russian missiles rained down upon the nation. That album featured music from a project called Organa which he has been working on for several years, in which medieval liturgical music is reconfigured for modular synths and non-classical vocalists.
“Early music and contemporary music have a lot in common,” says Shpudeiko. “Medieval music is less about harmonic development and more about creating a certain atmosphere and a feeling. Drone and ambient music is the same. It is designed to invoke certain religious experiences, mystical experiences.”
Shpudeiko is now living temporarily in Germany, one of hundreds of Ukrainian artists relocated around Europe (thanks to the support of Ukraine’s ministry of culture) who aim to preserve and further Ukrainian art in exile. He would have loved to have come to the UK: his English is flawless, London is his favourite city and he has long been influenced by British electronic artists such as Coil, Psychic TV, Current 93 and Death in June. But the UK’s asylum policy made this almost impossible. “It is incredibly hard to get a UK visa – it costs a lot of money and British embassies demand your passport for the duration of the application process, which can take as long as three months.”
‘Early music and contemporary music have a lot in common’ … Oleh Shpudeiko pictured in 2020. Photograph: Ksenia Popova
Shpudeiko was brought up in a Russian-speaking family but he rejects the myth – promulgated by Putin and his “Vatnik” apologists – that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are pro-Moscow. However, the invasion has changed his attitude towards the Russian language. “I used to read a lot in Russian. Things I wanted to read – the literature, or the books about music history or sound studies – were only available in English or Russian, never translated into Ukrainian.

“But after 24 February, I haven’t been able to read a single Russian book. I switched off that part of my brain. It was quite painful. I still speak Russian occasionally in non-official situations, like with my family, but officially I only use Ukrainian or English. I think we have all had to put Russian on pause for the duration of the war. It is extremely traumatic for any of us to deal with even the greatest Russian culture right now, knowing what they did in Bucha or Mariupol. I understand that this is not a healthy reaction, but there can be no healthy reactions to war.”
How does he see the war panning out? “I am the worst person to ask about this,” he says. “This time last year I was arguing with my girlfriend: ‘No of course there won’t be a full-scale invasion.’ Worst-case scenario was that there would be another active phase of war in the east. The Russians trying to take Kyiv seemed insane.”
Will he be touring Kyiv Eternal? “My live shows are much more improvised affairs. I’m not sure if I should ever perform this material outside of Ukraine. It is so closely connected with my home town. Maybe it can exist as a sound art installation, but it is too personal to think of doing this live.”
Kyiv Eternal is released on 24 February via Injazero Records.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

February 15, 2023