#EarthDayWithDNA: A map for all trees

Here's something you can do today for the planet today - go out and look at the trees in your neighbourhood, take photographs and enumerate them, then post everything on the India Biodiversity Portal. If you're lucky, you'll find others engaged in a similar exercise called the 'Neighbourhood Trees Campaign'.

This is the fourth year of the Campaign which is organised by India Biodiversity Portal (IBP), an open-access, crowd-sourced repository of information on the Internet about the country's biodiversity. While India is a 'megadiverse' country - that is, one of 17 countries which have 70 percent of the earth's biodiversity - the true extent of its biodiversity is yet to be mapped and catalogued. And it is here that an exercise such as the Trees Campaign proves helpful in "leveraging the power of the crowd to gather information," says Thomas Vattakaven, a member of the team that manages the Portal. "No single scientist can ever hope to gather as much information as a group of ordinary citizens."

The idea, adds Vattakaven, is to populate the "species pages" of trees with information about their distribution (every image, observation is geo-tagged), pictures, seasonal behaviour such as when they shed leaves or flower, folklores associated with them so that anyone researching a specific kind of tree would know about its abundance, what its habitat is, etc. Another indirect use of such data, which is both longitudinal (tracking geographical extent) and temporal (over time), is that it helps to determine whether there has been any increase or decrease in tree species in an area, helping ecologists with conservation planning.

And, going by the exponentially growing number of 'observations' coming in from all across India - from 3,300 in 2014, to 7,954 in 2015 and 14,200 last year - nature lovers are realising the importance of such 'citizen science' initiatives. Approximately, 1,900 species of trees have been covered by these observations - around 80 percent of the number of species considered to be found in India. The neem tree, it came out in last year's Campaign, was the most common tree in India, followed by the areca palm and the African mahogany.

But there are also surprises. Ravi Vaidyanathan, Mulund resident and passionate tree watcher, says he has come across Baobab trees in the area. "Baobabs are actually African trees which were brought in by the Portuguese because they thought they were sacred. Campaigns such as these are important because most people don't even know about the exotic trees around them. With knowledge, they will support conservation, especially as the BMC has been rampantly cutting down trees."

Another passionate tree-watcher and regular participant at the Tree Campaigns, Rujuta Vinod says it has become his post-retirement mission "to create awareness about importance of native plant species and eco-restoration of the degraded lands, hills, plateaus, wetlands, grasslands"around Pune, where he lives.