Use of Geospatial Database in Sustainable Forest Management

The multiplicity of forest products and their uses, and the conflicts it may cause among the stakeholders and various interests makes forestry planning in India to be considerably complex. The particular features of forestry, namely: its long gestation period and investment horizon (often not matching with the social time preference); the difficulty to distinguish between forest capital and incremental growth (often leading to over-exploitation and capital consumption); and the high level of externalities further add to its complexity. Environmental balance is the prime objective of the management of the forests simultaneously harvesting the increment on sustainable basis to meet the demands of the local people and the society. The conventional method of making inputs for management or working plans in India using ground survey is tedious process and time consuming. The treatment map, for example, which prepared based on ocular estimation results in rather inaccurate and inconsistent treatment types and more than this each division has hundreds of coupes due for working each year hence the above task is assigned to many persons with varying degrees of experience and knowledge. All the treatments are supposed to be carried out according to these treatment maps. Hence the weakness of the present practice is selfevident. The present study analysed the feasibility of using remote sensing and GIS in generation of inputs for forest working plan preparation and the further use of these geospatial database in sustainable forest management. It has been demonstrated that the generation of forest type map; treatment map; stock map; updation of compartment boundary, segregation of working circles, felling series and coupes and site suitability assessment for silvicultural practices and soil & moisture conservation works can be achieved quickly with much more accuracy; consistency and cost-effectiveness by using remotely sensed data in GIS environment. Due to its capability to provide timely, synoptic and repetitive coverage over large areas across various spatial scales, frequent and periodical monitoring and evaluation of the forest resources would be possible for proper maintenance and management. Integration of spatial and non-spatial layers in GIS would help the managers for identifying suitable areas for site-specific treatment, identifying the potentials & limitations of different compartments, making innumerable queries to find answers to their day-to-day management questions.