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Nina Varghese

Technology enables the TN Government to restore degraded forests.

The forests in Tamil Nadu are greening and technology has played a pivotal role in this regeneration.

A review of the forests in 1997 showed that a third of Tamil Nadu's 22,800 sq.km of forests was degraded due to illicit felling, overgrazing and forest fires. Almost a decade later, large areas of the degraded forests are regenerating, thanks to the Tamil Nadu Afforestation Project (TAP).

C.K. Sreedharan, Principal Chief Conservator of Forest, Tamil Nadu says one of the reasons why the forests in India had degenerated is wrong land use policy. Forests were seen as a source of non-tax revenue for the State.

The change in thinking happened in the early nineties, and forests were no longer seen as a source of economic or commercial benefit but as a resource for the ecological benefit of the State.

Serious thinking at the national and state level on how to reverse the damage to forests resulted in the Joint Forest Management programme, which was started for planning, conservation, afforestation and benefit sharing.

The State forest department launched the TAP funded by a soft loan of Rs 688 crore from the Japan Bank of International Co-operation (JBIC) for a period of eight years starting from 1997-98. The success of the first phase has encouraged the Forest Department to launch the second phase of TAP with an outlay of Rs 567.42 crore from JBIC for another eight years.

Giant sponges

Though Tamil Nadu has 32 river systems and 38,000 irritation tanks, the State has been prone to droughts and floods mainly because of the wrong land use policy, says Sreedharan.

These rivers start in the reserve forests in the Western and Eastern Ghats. So the forests have to be managed and conserved for catchment and preserve the bio diversity of the Ghats, he says. According to the Natural Resource Defence Council, an environment action group, "Forests help us breathe by creating oxygen and filtering pollutants from the air, and help stabilise the global climate by absorbing carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. They soak up rainfall like giant sponges, preventing floods and purifying water that we drink. They provide habitat for 90 per cent of the plant and animal species that live on land, as well as homelands for many of the earth's last remaining indigenous cultures."

According to estimates, about 7 lakh tonnes of fuel wood, 1.25 lakh tonnes of fodder and green manure and 10,000 cubic metres of small timber are annually removed from the forests, in Tamil Nadu. Over one lakh people are engaged in head load removals.

Enter GIS lab

To assess the degradation, a Geographical Information System (GIS) lab was set up in 1997 in collaboration with the National Remote Sensing Agency. Personnel from the Tamil Nadu Forest Department were trained at ITC Netherlands (International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation.) and at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing in Dehradun.

The Geomatics Centre in Chennai has identified degraded forests in Tamil Nadu using visual interpretation of satellite data in collaboration with the Institute of Remote Sensing, Anna University.

The Centre has carried out the digitisation of reserve forest boundaries on 1:50,000 scale for the entire State. The digitisation of forest administrative boundaries such as beats, ranges, divisions and districts on 1:50,000 scale for the entire State has been done.

The digital image processing using satellite imagery has been completed for all the districts. The reserve forests and the trees outside the forest areas have been classified in different density classes such as dense forest, open forest dense tree cover, sparse tree cover, rocky area, barren area and scrub.

Forest officials say this will help in identifying areas that have become degraded, analyse the cause and then work on the regeneration and replanting with indigenous trees.

District forest atlas

Besides, forest cover change analysis has been done for Tiruvannamalai and Vellore districts using satellite remote sensing. The documentation of work done in the programme villages under TAP in Thiruvannamalai and Kanchipuram districts on the GIS platform has been completed. District forest atlases for all the districts have been prepared.

Sreedharan points out that the GIS has helped the Tamil Nadu Forest department assess the damage and then set about corrective measures such as watershed development, replanting, empowerment of women, buffer zone activities and an intrgrated tribal development programme.

(Buffer zone is the area between the villages and the forests. Activities undertaken by the Forest Department are mainly income generation activities and community development work).

Mapping forest fires

GIS has also been useful in mapping forest fires. Forest Department officials say that last year there were about 60 forest fires in Tamil Nadu.

Real time monitoring of the fires is done at NRSI and the data is transferred to the Geomatics Centre in Guindy, Chennai. The department is also doing a five-year study on forest fires.

The Geomatics Centre has done coastal zone vegetation mapping, vegetation change detection and analysis and wildlife habitat mapping.

The Centre plans to do coastal zone vegetation mapping for disaster management, digitisation of boundary stones and pillars for forest areas, watershed marking and delineation with model treatment maps.

The other proposed activities include species-specific habitat studies and disaster management for tsunamis with focus on mangroves and corals.

nina@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Technology | Environment | Tamil Nadu

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