Resource Flows of Villages with Contrasting Lifestyles in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, Central Himalaya, India

Resource use efficiency analyses of village ecosystem are necessary for effective and efficient planning of resource utilization. This paper deals with economic and energy input-output analyses of different components of village ecosystem in representative buffer zone villages, which are practicing transhumance and settled way of lifestyles in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (NDBR) of Garhwal Himalaya. While the villages practicing transhumance used various natural resources spatially segregated,the villages practicing settled way of lifestyle have to manage resources from a limited spatial area through rotation and varied extraction intensities. Forests subsidized the production activity in both type of villages and the per capita resource extractions were found to be greater in transhumance village than settled village. Though crops provided maximum energy, in terms of economic criteria, animal husbandry played important role in both settled and transhumance villages. As villages representing both the situations showed different ways of adjustments to the conservation oriented land use changes, management authority needs to address theeco-development plans fulfilling the aspirations of all people traditionally using the resources of the Reserve to reduce the conflicts and encourage their participation in the conservation of the area.

The seamless model for three-dimensional datum transformation

With extensive applications of space geodesy, three-dimensional datum transformation model has been necessarily used to transform the coordinates in the different coordinate systems.Its essence is to predict the coordinates of non-common points in the second coordinate system based on their coordinates in the first coordinate system and the coordinates of common points in two coordinate systems.Traditionally, the computation of seven transformation parameters and the transformation of noncommon points are individually implemented, in which the errors of coordinates are taken into account only in the second system although the coordinates in both two systems are inevitably contaminated by the random errors.Moreover, the coordinate errors of non-common points are disregarded when they are transformed using the solved transformation parameters.Here we propose the seamless (rigorous) datum transformation model to compute the transformation parameters and transform the non-common points integratively, considering the errors of all coordinates in both coordinate systems.As a result, a nonlinear coordinate transformation model is formulated.Based on the Gauss-Newton algorithm and the numerical characteristics of transformation parameters, two linear versions of the established nonlinear model are individually derived.Then the least-squares collocation (prediction) method is employed to trivially solve these linear models.Finally, the simulation experiment is carried out to demonstrate the performance and benefits of the presented method.The results show that the presented method can significantly improve the precision of the coordinate transformation, especially when the non-common points are strongly correlated with the common points used to compute the transformation parameters.