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IIT Jodhpur Launches Thar DESIGNS To Conserve And Restore Thar Desert

This unique initiative is a part of the Jodhpur City Knowledge and Innovation Cluster to conserve and restore the natural deserts and their minerals and flora & fauna.

Under the aegis of the Jodhpur City Knowledge and Innovation Cluster, the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur has launched Thar Desert Ecosystem Sciences Guided by Nature and Selection (DESIGNS), an initiative to conserve and restore the Thar desert, its minerals and medicines, and its flora and fauna by carrying out Ecosystem phenomics through the transdisciplinary framework of Medical, Engineering, Environmental and Life Sciences. 

The Jodhpur City Knowledge and Innovation Cluster (JCKIC) has under one umbrella brought together organizations from the Engineering, Space research, Medical, Agricultural, Zoological and Forestry that have carried out focused efforts in tackling diverse aspects of the Thar desert. This collaboration includes projects that address the complex and networked issues of the desert in an integrative framework.

Under this initiative, the researchers will use IOT enabled devices and Big Data analytics framework to crowdsource observations from the local ecosystem to the regional level keeping the cultural context and traditional medicine knowledge in perspective. They would also integrate computer vision and Machine learning along with domain knowledge to infer links between environment, phenotype and genotype at geo spatiotemporal scales and identify signatures of Thar DESIGNS for early actionable intervention strategies. This knowledge generation will result in providing a ‘Desert Ecosystem Knowledge Grid’ that could foster the cycle of engineering- research-development-commercialization.


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IIT Jodhpur Thar DESIGNS restoration Thar Desert R&D

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