Mr. Jeeban Panthi and Mr. Piyush Dahal from SEN presented their research works as posters at MtnClimate conference organized at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, Colorado USA from 17 to 21 September 2018. Both of them presented their research works on mountain climate and hydrology issues from the Karnali basin, Nepal.
The first poster was about the climate and river runoff scenarios in the Karnali basin. Analysis of historical climate and extremes, looking at how the future climate looks like analyzing the climate model data and developing river runoff for different climatic scenarios in two-time scales (2040-2069, 2070-2099) were the important aspects of the poster. The second poster was about the rainwater harvesting in the Karnali basin. It was about our ongoing research project (an APN project led by Mr. Panthi) on rainwater harvesting site suitability mapping for the Karnali basin and the development of a mobile application as a decision support system for rainwater installation. Use of open access tools was a beauty of the research; it is a good motivation to the researchers based in developing countries who cannot afford money for software. Both the posters attracted a large number of participants. Everyone appreciated the research projects and were interested to know the climate and water situation in the Himalayan region, and these were the only research presentations from the Himalayan region to the conference. Few constructive comments from the participants were noted which will be useful while writing manuscripts for publication.
As part of the conference, there was a day-long field trip to see the research projects in the Rocky mountain areas. RMBL has a long-term research plot for ecological study and a dense network of weather and snow monitoring stations for climate and hydrological studies. Prof David Inouie was at RMBL in 1971 for the first time as a graduate student and he has been working on his long-term studies of flowering phenology and plant demography since then. This was really an inspiration for researchers to keep patience for a continued research. There were few sessions other than paper presentations, such as field sensors and data management workshop, networking for mountain sustainability etc.
The conference was attended by 100 scientists, university professors, and graduate students from across the world who are working on mountains in climate, hydrology, ecology, and social issues. The MtnClimate conference is organized every two years in a mountain to highlights the importance and research carried out in mountain areas. The details of the conference are available at http://www.rmbl.org/mtn-clim-2018/
