RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 112, NO. 10, 25 MAY 2017 2100 *For correspondence. (e-mail: subrats@rediffmail.com) 8. Gillis, M., Leckie, D. and Pick, R., Satellite imagery assists in the assessment of hail damage for salvage harvest. For. Chron., 1990, 66, 463–468. 9. Parker, M. D., Ratcliffe, I. C. and Henebry, G. M., The July 2003 Dakota hailswaths: creation, characteristics and possible impacts. Mon. Weather Rev., 2005, 133, 1241–1260. 10. Krishna, T. M., Ravikumar, G. and Krishnaveni, M., Remote sens- ing based agricultural drought assessment in Palar basin of Tamil Nadu state, India. J. Indian Soc. Remote Sens., 2009, 37, 9–20. 11. Dutta, S., Singh, S. K. and Panigrahy, S., Assessment of late blight induced diseased potato crops: a case study for West Bengal district using temporal AWiFS and MODIS data. J. Indian Soc. Remote Sensing, 2014, 42, 353–361. 12. 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S., Forecasting wheat yield in Punjab State of India by combining crop simulation model wofost and remotely sensed inputs. Remote Sens. Lett., 2013, 4, 19–28. 17. Singh, R. S., Patel, C., Yadav, M. K. and Singh, K. K., Yield fore- casting of rice and wheat crops for eastern Uttar Pradesh. J. Agrometeorol., 2014, 16, 199–202. 18. Singh, P. K. et al., Rice (Oryza sativa L.) yield gap using the CERES-rice model of climatevariability for different agroclimatic zones of India. Curr. Sci., 2016, 110, 405–413. 19. Zhao, J., Zhang, D., Luo, J., Huang, S., Dong, Y. and Huang, W., Detection and mapping of hail damage to corn using domestic remotely sensed data in China. Aus. J. Crop Sci., 2012, 6, 101– 108. 20. Molthan, A. L., Burks, J. E., Mcgrath, K. M. and Lafontaine, F. J., Multi-sensor examination of hail damage swaths for near real-time applications and assessment. J. Ope. Meteor., 2013, 1, 144–156. 21. de Leeuw, J. et al., The potential and uptake of remote sensing in insurance: a review. Remote Sens., 2014, 6, 10888–10912. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. We thank the Secretary, Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare and Jt Secretary (IT), for their encouragement. We also thank the team members of FASAL pro- ject for providing the wheat crop map. Received 18 September 2016; revised accepted 28 December 2016 doi: 10.18520/cs/v112/i10/2095-2100 Vulnerability of Indian Central Himalayan forests to fire in a warming climate and a participatory preparedness approach based on modern tools Subrat Sharma* and Harshit Pant G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment and Sustainable Development, Kosi-Katarmal, Almora 263 643, India Wildfires have been considered as part of the natural cycle, but the globe is witnessing them more often out- side the natural cycle. In recent years, incidences of wild fire/forest fire are increasing globally, and also in India. The Himalayan region is not an exception, where wide inter-annual fluctuations occur in fire events, and a few of them lead to disasters resulting in immediate and cascading social and economic impacts and thus to vulnerability and exposure of Himalayan forests to current climate variability. Mountainous topography and insufficient state resources are a bottleneck to respond to fire disasters. This study analy- ses the role of climate as a precursor to large-scale forest fires, and the perception of village forest coun- cils on the impact of forest fire and climate change. A framework has been proposed for integration of ground-based observation network and prevailing modern technologies as a mechanism to develop a fire potential index to reduce disturbances and for resource optimization in case of disastrous fires. Keywords: Climate change, community forest, fire potential index, forest fire, Himalaya. FOR the countries of the world, impacts of climate change are consistent with a significant lack of preparedness for current climate variability 1 . A changing climate leads to changes in the attributes of extreme events (frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing); hence un- precedented extreme weather and climate events are becoming frequent 2,3 . Impacts from recent climate-related extremes (heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, wild- fires, etc.) reveal significant vulnerability to current climate variability (very high confidence) 2 and exposure to ecosystems 4 , including many human systems. Global records from 1880 indicate a steady increase in warm years and increasing frequency 5 , particularly after 1980 (Figure 1 a). This is also evident by the occurrence of ten warm years during the past decade (2001–10) and the warmest year (among all the previous years) till date 6 , i.e. 2015. The same holds true for the Asian continent, where deficit in annual precipitation during the southwest mon- soon season in India was also observed for the same year