Venue: IIIT Bangalore
Date: 30 April, 2025
The Sustainable Sandalwood Workshop aims to spark discussion about interdisciplinary approaches to conserving sandalwood in South India.
About the workshop
For millennia, sandalwood has played an important role in Indian cultural, religious, and therapeutic practices. Long sought after as a prized perfumery material and fixative, a history of overharvesting and illegal logging has led to a dwindling sandalwood population in its original native range in South India. The disappearance of sandalwood over the past 30 years adds to the urgency of capturing relevant local knowledge about the tree from aging populations, as well as the importance of supporting preservation and renewed cultivation efforts. As a valuable resource, sandalwood cultivation in agroforestry could offer Indian farmers in semi-arid zones an important source of income.
The aim of the workshop is to tackle the following questions:
1) What is the current population of sandalwood in South India, and what challenges are faced in conserving and cultivating the tree?
2) How can indigenous knowledge about sandalwood be captured to support broader cultural awareness, decision-making and cultivation practices?
3) How can community involvement support sandalwood conservation and cultivation?
Who should attend?
The sustainable sandalwood workshop brings together design researchers, forestry experts, data scientists and archivists to reflect on ways in which we can capture and organize indigenous knowledge about sandalwood in South India and create conditions for community-based conservation and cultivation aimed at supporting the local population of the tree.
Agenda
30 April, 2025
| Time (IST) | Event / Talk | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Registration & Coffee | |
| 10:00 | Welcome, Sandalwood and olfactory guardianship | Simon Niedenthal |
| 10:15 | The state of sandalwood: current South Indian populations and conservation strategies | Arun Kumar |
| 10:45 | Design strategies for capturing indigenous knowledge of precious forestry resources | Lizette Reitsma |
| 11:15 | Coffee | |
| 11:30 | Sensory mining of sandalwood knowledge: text extraction from regional language and natural language processing | Srinath Srinavasa |
| 12:00 | Shaping an archive of sandalwood knowledge: the perspective from Mysore | Shalini Urs |
| 12:30 | Lunch | |
| 14:00 | Discussions | |
| 16:00 | Closing Remarks |
01 May, 2025
| Site visits and field work (Mysore) |
Expected Outcomes
- Expand our understanding of the challenges of cultivating and conserving sandalwood trees.
- Begin to shape initial ontologies for a knowledge base about sandalwood.
- Begin to identify local communities in which to conduct fieldwork accessing indigenous knowledge about sandalwood.
