VIT students publish coffee table book on wildlife conservation

​Hyderabad: A coffee table book on conservation of wildlife has been published by students of VIT University, Vellore.

The book Airflow, Comfort and Habitability of Game Reserves was written by Dhruv Gangadharan Arvind and co-authored by his guide Prof Satyajit Ghosh and college senior Siddhartha Mukherjee, the lead photographer. It was launched recently in Chennai

Talking about his motivation for writing the book, Dhruv Gangadharan Arvind said "I felt it was my responsibility to incorporate the latest technology in the conservation of wildlife and aid the perpetuity of nature.”

“I wanted to use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to examine fluid flows” in the natural habitats of tigers at the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu and Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, explains the 22-year-old graduate.

The book, accompanied by photographs, says comfort levels of these big cats in their habitats could be ascertained by defining a value known as the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV); the habitability of the natural reserves is determined on a scale from -3 (very cold) to +3 (very hot) with 0 being neutral.

This is done using advances in CFD – through applied mathematics and fluid dynamics – and ENVI-met Version 4, a microclimatic model to simulate areas of interest spatially and temporally in view of biometeorology.

Dhruv explains, "We found that the habitats under analysis aren’t optimally habitable for these big cats, owing to changes in atmospheric variables – the effect of climate change pollutants through anthropogenic influences, loss of green cover and wetlands through habitat desiccation and encroachment."