Wetland conservation: Issues and application  S. N. Prasad T. SenGupta  Alok Kumar V. S. Vijayan Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, Coimbatore  A. K. Tiwari Regional Remote Sensing Service Centre, Dehradun Uttaranchal Introduction The UNCED conference on environment and development as well as global conservation organizations, including RAMSAR convention, have identified the aquatic biodiversity to be the most threatened of all biodiversities. There is, therefore, an urgent and felt need to conserve the aquatic biodiversity including the ecosystem processes. Wetlands cover an area of about 5.5 million ha, of which 1.5 million ha enjoy complete protection and 1.6 million ha partial protection. India being a developing country supporting the second largest population in the world, having mainly agrarian economy, has a significant impact on all natural resources including that of wetlands. It is in this context, an inventory of the important wetlands is essential. The directory of Asian Wetlands (1989) lists 93 Wetlands of International importance in India. Information on the type and extent of wetlands is lacking in India. Hence, this information is a baseline requirement for forming protected area network and conservation. However, so far in India there has been no systematic attempt to evolve conservation preserves analogous to terrestrial protected areas. While many developing countries such as China and south-east Asian countries have progressed substantially in formulating an action plan for conserving aquatic biodiversity, similar task of identifying such reserves for India is lacking. While a country like UK could designate 161 Ramsar sites, obviously India being a mega diverse country will have many more than the 20 sites presently identified by the national wetland programme. Such a task is daunting given the size, diversity of India. In this paper, we outline a possible approach for identifying important wetland sites taking into account the tremendous advances made in spatial technology tools. In particular, we demonstrate how tools of remote sensing and geographic information system combined with an extremely well coordinated and organised field programme could contribute to formation of a viable national level wetland conservation and monitoring programme. 
Fig 1: SACON Field Station, Dehradun
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