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Pratibha Chauhan
Tribune News Service
Shimla, December 24
With the experiment of undertaking drone mapping of the forest cover in Jakhu and Kanlog municipal wards of the town giving a high percentage of accuracy in getting the tree count, the government is likely to go in for the technology to keep a check on illegal felling.
So far tree count has been undertaken with the help of drones in only two wards of Jakhu and Kanlog, having reasonably vast forest cover. There are a total of 34 municipal wards within the Shimla Municipal Corporation and after seeing the high success of the tree count undertaken though drones, the exercise could be undertaken in all the remaining 32 wards.
The Council for Science, Technology and Environment is planning to purchase four drones so as to undertake mapping of the forest cover in the state. The experiment has revealed that the error in case of vegetation (forests) is only about 2.67 per cent. However, the scope of error in case of roads was higher at about 8.67 per cent and in case of buildings this figure stands at 10.06 per cent.
The accuracy achieved in tree count in Jakhu region was fairly good. In Kanlog region accuracy level was slightly lower as compared to Jakhu region are most of the errors were caused by buildings and road features.
Officials said that some problem was faced in getting the exact tree count in the areas with dense forest and certain amount of variance was there when the trees were counted manually. The drone mapping gives the exact number of trees along with their geo location. While in Jakhu the area covered was 0.51 sq kms, in Kanlog the area covered was 1.50 sq km and the number of trees counted were 3,611 and 15,434, respectively.
Illegal felling of trees is a major concern for the Forest Department in a state like Himachal. Since the forest area is huge and most of it is inaccessible, it becomes very difficult to monitor the forest reserves for the staff of the forest department.
“The possibility of carrying out illegal activities like felling of trees is far higher in the urban areas due to the huge demand for land for construction activity, so drone mapping will give us a fairly accurate number,” admitted a forest officer.
It has very often been seen that the people in Shimla deliberately trap the roots of the trees in the retaining wall or in a concrete structure. Once the tree starts drying up, a case is moved before the Tree Authority Committee of the MC to give sanction to remove it as it was posing a threat to the house.
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