Mewan Banshan War, Ph.D student working with Dr. Kiran Chand Thumaty participated and gave an Oral Presentation of  their research work on Assessing Fire-Induced Hydrological Changes in an Indian Tropical Forest Using Remote Sensing at the 2025 IEEE India Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (InGARSS) held from 10 – 13 December at IIIT Bhubaneshwar. Here is the summary of the paper as explained by the authors: 

 The present study investigates the hydrological changes after the 2021 fire outbreak in a forest in the Simlipal Biosphere Reserve, Odisha, using remotely sensed (RS) data on surface runoff, evapotranspiration (ET), and soil moisture. A rainfall-runoff model using daily gridded rainfall and satellite-derived land cover inputs is implemented in Google Earth Engine to simulate runoff values for 2016–2023. Despite the lack of in situ measurements, model simulations are comparable to ERA5-Land runoff values (R² = 0.51). Results from burned and unburned scenarios reveal no significant change in the runoff estimates due to the fire, likely because of the limited 7% burned area, falling below the 25% response threshold. Conversely, forest fire pixel counts correlate negatively with rainfall and ET in the dry season. Reductions in vegetation index and soil moisture reflect fire-induced biomass and water loss. The study provides a baseline for assessing fire-driven ecohydrological changes in an Indian tropical forest using RS and cloud-based modelling.

December 2025