http://www.mydigitalfc.com/
June 15, 2010

Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has developed two software tools for forest departments for management, monitoring and development of forests in the country.

“For the last three years we have been developing and testing Aranya, a spatial decision support system for forest resource management, forest cover dynamics and prediction system to identify agents of change,” Medha Dhurandhar head of Geomatics Solutions Development group (GSDG) of C-DAC said. GSDG is engaged in exploring geomatics technologies for providing information in the application areas of natural resources management, disaster management, mineral exploration and environmental management.

A pilot project undertaken in the Western Ghats and northeast India, the two well-known biodiversity hot spots of the world by a team of 30 researchers from C-DAC will be completed in December 2010. Department of information technology, Isro and Natural Resources Sensing Centre, Hyderabad together have funded the project with Rs 5 crore grants.

Sandeep Kumar Srivastava, group coordinator, GSDG, said the software had yielded impressive results and already forest departments in Assam, Uttaranchal, Sikhim and Bihar had shown keen interest to buy.

Srivastava said the software tools will be immensely useful for forest officials in bio-diversity, protection of the forest, vegetation carbon calculation, working plan preparation, forest village relocation planning and generation, updating and retrieval of forest data.

Dhurandhar said the forest cover dynamics and prediction system generates future maps (landcover) using historic image data.