Tag: sustainability of natural resources

The 'National Environmental Engineering Research Institute' (NEERI), Nagpur was established in 1958 as 'Central Public Health Engineering Research Institute' (CPHERI). Mrs Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, renamed the Institute as 'National Environmental Engineering Research Institute' (NEERI) in the year 1974. 'National Environmental Engineering Research Institute' (NEERI), is devoted to research and innovations in environmental science and engineering, besides solving a range of problems posed by industry, government and public.

Conservation is the act of protecting and preserving the natural resources or biodiversity from being depleted by taking proper resource management measures. This helps in minimizing the destruction of our natural resources like cutting of trees or deforestation.

Biogas is produced from raw materials such as agricultural waste, manure, municipal waste, plant material, sewage or food waste. It is a clean and renewable gas. It burns without any smoke.

Natural resources are materials provided by the earth that humans can use to make more complex (human-made) products.

Wind turbines convert the kinetic energy in the wind into mechanical power. This mechanical power can be used for specific tasks (such as grinding grain or pumping water) or a generator can convert this mechanical power into electric power.

Tidal energy is the indirect form of solar energy. Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combine effects of the gravitational force exerted by the Moon and Sun and the rotation of the Earth. About 1% of the total solar radiation that reaches earth is converted into energy of wind. As the sun heats different parts of the earth at different rates, air circulates from cold to warm areas producing winds.

In situ conservation is on-site conservation or the conservation of genetic resources in natural populations of plant or animal species, such as forest genetic resources in natural populations of tree species. National parks, wildlife sanctuaries and biosphere reserves are examples for in-situ conservation.

Ex situ conservation is the conservation and maintenance of samples of living organisms outside their natural habitat, in the form of whole plants, seed, pollen, vegetative propagules, tissue or cell cultures.
In vitro techniques have been increasingly used for plants in the last 40-50 years. Conservation of genebank accessions is only one of several uses for the techniques. The basic procedure consists of conserving parts of plants in flasks or tubes in artificial media, under controlled environments, normally in sterile conditions. A prerequisite of successful in vitro conservation is that the plants or plant parts can be regenerated into complete plants for growth and use in any of the ways that genetic resources are used.
Cryopreservation or cryoconservation is a process, where cells, whole tissues, or any other substances susceptible to damage caused by chemical reactivity or time are preserved by cooling to sub-zero temperatures.
All these methods could be used to conserve vegetatively propagating crops.

Gene banks are a type of biorepository, which preserve genetic material. For plants, this could be by freezing cuttings from the plant or stocking the seeds (e.g., in a seedbank). 

A phytotron is an enclosed research greenhouse used for studying interactions between plants and the environment. Phytotrons are chambers, that provide controlled environmental conditions for growing plants. Phytotrons have been extensively used for research on how various environmental factors affect plant growth and development.