GUWAHATI, April 08: With the aim of complementing conservation of northeast India’s rich natural heritage, country’s premier biodiversity conservation organisation Aaranyak, over the last twenty years trained about 1500 frontline forest staff including forest guards, foresters and even forest rangers on the use of GPS in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. This was informed by the NGO publicity secretary Dr Alolika Sinha through an e-press statement here today.
The NGO informed that they have offered 23 regular training programmes to students, researchers, and other institutions and all these programmes are related to the conservation of forests and around 350 people have benefited from such trainings.
According to the NGO CEO Dr Bibhab Kumar Talukdar, Aaranyak launched its Geo-Spatial Technology and Application Division (GTAD) in 2005 while keeping in mind the importance on the use of GPS and GIS tools in conservation and development planning. GPS has proved in today’s world as an important tool that has been assisting in mapping land use changes, navigation of aeroplane, ships, vehicles etc., and was proved helpful for older humans to track their locations in many countries. GIS tools has been playing key role in providing valuable data, information and insights through GIS-based maps to enable apt decision making, he added.
According to their GIS resource team leader Arup Kumar Das, the knowledge of Remote Sensing & GIS and especially use of GPS helps forest personnel in many ways like documentation or create inventories of spatial based information of habitat, animals’ movements or sighting locations, which helps in better monitoring and surveillance, facilitate more informed, effective and timely based decision management. We in Aaranyak are always ready to disseminate this knowledge in this field to be utilised for the greater benefits of the biodiversity conservation
Senior member of the GIS resource team Madhumita Borthakur stated that it is a privilege to be able to support the custodians of our precious forest and its resources. In the technology-dominated age, RS-GIS technology is helping them monitor and study the natural resources in a more cost and time effective manner.
The NGO informed that training on GPS helps forest personnel navigating through forest canopies, locating habitat as well as animals, collecting data/information from the field, tracking and tracing animal movements, determining boundaries and area measurements, plotting the information in map etc. Members of Aaranyak’s Geospatial Technology and Applications team also serve as guest faculty at various institutions to impart knowledge. Assam Forest School, Tata Institute of Social Science, Central Academy of State Forest Service Byrnihat are among these schools, concluded the NGO.