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Maharashtra working plan incorporates GIS
J.S. Grewal
Conservator of Forest, Working Plan Circle,
Maharashtra
Forest Department, Nagpur
cfwpc@nagpur.dot.net.in
Integration of MIS and
GIS is a powerful planning and decision support tool for the Working Plan
Officer.
In Maharashtra,
GIS is being used in the preparation of working plans. Working with GIS during
the last two years has helped us to visualize its wide application not only for
working plan preparation but also in the field of implementing and monitoring of
forestry activities.
Forest Management Functions
Basically a forest
manager has to perform the following core functions:
- Planning
- Implementation
- Control
- Organisation
To be able to
perform these functions a forest manager has to seek answers to many questions
of the following type:
- What treatment/action is
required in which part of his forest?
- What are the viable
alternatives available?
- Which is the best
alternative?
- What will be the sequence of
actions?
- Who will be responsible for
carrying out each of the actions?
- Who will be monitoring the
performance of plan?
To find clear
answers to questions of the above kind a lot of data is required. Moreover this
data has to be in such a format that it can be viewed and synthesised easily and
quickly. Some of the typical data needs of a forest planner are listed below.
This list is by no means exhaustive,A it is indicative only.
Data needs for forest planner
- Forest cover
- Composition
- Structure
- Crown density
- Regeneration status
- Site quality
- Negative influences
- Sensitive spots
- Boundaries
- Topo features
- Soils
- Climatic data
- Moisture regime
- Biotic influences
- Markets
Need for digital databases
The problem with
the non-digital databases arises because of the sheer volume of data. It is very
difficult to synthesise and comprehend such large volumes through manual
systems. The other major problem with manual systems is that of retrieval.
Information is generally collected from various sources and at various times,
which not only overloads the system but makes it very unreliable and
inconsistent too.
Managers for
land-based systems have to invariably deal with multitude of maps.
These maps are
available on different scales and at times even in different projection systems,
which makes it very difficult to manipulate geographical information. Because of
these and many more problems it is much more convenient to capture data
digitally and centrally.
Integration of
remote sensing data with GIS related decision support systems could make the job
of land managers very easy.
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