FORESTRY: Drones to prevent illegal cutting of trees in the forests of Himachal Pradesh.
The objective was to keep a count of the number of trees, map the entire forest cover and spot any illegal activities in the forest of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh.
Overview
Imagine the value of one deodar tree. According to the officials in the forest department of Shimla, the value of one deodar tree is approximately INR 5 lakhs, which many mafia organisations are aware of. That’s why there have been multiple cases where hundreds and thousands of trees have been reportedly stolen. The incident came to the attention of the Shimla High Court, and after that, the Council for Science, Technology and Environment took command and experimented with multiple technologies to curb the illegal activities. Some of them were:
- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): In this technology, passive or active chips are inserted in trees which keep emitting signals, that gets received by a remote receiver. However, it had many limitations. First of all, the trees were physically inaccessible making it extremely difficult to install the sensors due to the steep slope of the terrain. Second, its battery life is limited, and usually becomes dead due to the snowfall or extreme cold. Maintenance, in itself, would become a challenge. Third, what if someone remove the sensors from the tree, and continue the cutting process. Hence, this technology proved to be a failure for meeting the above objective.
- Satellite imagery: The council also undertook the task of preparing the change matrix of the forests within the Shimla Municipal Corporation. It helped in visualising the decline of forest cover but didn’t help much in counting the trees because of its poor resolution. Also, it is not easy to get the satellite imagery on time.
- Drone mapping: Finally, they decided to conduct a trial with drones.
Indshine took this responsibility and conducted a drone mapping of the two wards — Kanlog and Jakhu (having the highest concentration of forests) in Shimla. According to a news report covering this case,
“The preliminary results have indicated that the use of drones for undertaking forest mapping is successful and can help in checking illegal felling to a great extent,” admitted a senior bureaucrat.
Challenges/Problems
- The terrain of both the wards was hilly, and it was impossible to reach at many places in the forest physically.
- Due to a very dense tree cover, it would be a herculean task to count the trees manually, or install sensors.
- Manual calculation of the area of forest cover is again complicated.
- No recent map was available for planning to stop illegal activities.
- Identifying and counting the trees present on private lands.
- No proof or way to prove illegal activities in court.
Methods Used
We used our drone (mounted with GPS) to fly over the forest and captured a large number of high-resolution images. Then we used photogrammetry techniques to stitch those images and create a 2D map and 3D model of the entire forest area. We also captured an aerial video to get the bird’s eye view of the forest. Let us look at some of the essential details about the methods used:
Area covered: 2 sq. km.
Drone Used: Hexacopter (Drone with six wings/propellers)
Camera Used: Sony A6000 (24MP camera)
Total Flight Time: 4 hours
Images acquired: 1164 images
Time taken in stitching those images to create a 2D map: 8 hours
Solutions
The major advantage of using drones is that it makes the entire process terrain independent. Plus, our drones maintain a constant height with respect to the uneven terrain automatically. In other words, if the elevation of that area is increasing in a particular direction, the drone will fly higher to maintain a constant elevation difference from the area below. Let us look at the solutions we came up with, and how it helped the officials to track the illegal activities.
- Aerial Video: It helped all the officials to get a quick overview of the forest in the simplest way possible.
- High-resolution Orthomosaic/2D map: By visualising the entire forest cover on a single map, we were able to locate and mark the specific spots where the number of trees were quite less compared to the surrounding areas. It also helped in finding out the illegally created routes inside the forest to facilitate transportation of trees to the main roads. Finally, it helped in counting the total number of trees, one of the main objectives.
- Land use/Land cover map: Using this map, we classified the forest from the residential area, roads, water bodies etc. and calculated area under the forest cover.
- A Detailed Report: Additionally, we provided a report which consisted of the methods used, number of trees in the area, and scope of using the technology to monitor the illegal activities and take actions accordingly. This report along with the deliverables were presented in the court to prove that there are illegal activities going on and proved capabilities of drone based solution to solve their problems.
Besides, we hosted all the above data on Felix, our project collaboration platform where they could not only visualise the orthomosaic & aerial video but also can share and discuss over the platform to quickly come to a conclusion and take necessary actions.
Gallery
About Indshine
Indshine provides enterprise drone solutions to highways, railways, mining, smart city, power transmission, forestry etc. Please visit www.indshine.com to know more. If you have any query or want a demo, kindly drop us an email at info@indshine.com.
