Local Communities use advanced technology to produce estimates of Forest Inventory!

Indian School of Business conducted a Forest Inventory Mapping exercise to produce a probabilistic estimate of the production potential of nine Seasonal Forest Products in Gumla. Local communities participated in the data collection exercise to record ground truthing information, location of the Seasonal Forest Products, forest measurement parameters like girth of individual trees and approximate values of the production capacity of each tree, in approximately 5100-point locations within the sampling plots in the district. This information is combined with remote sensing products and machine learning models to estimate the distribution of the selected Seasonal Forest Products and the volume of production for each species.

The Forest Inventory exercise will enable local communities to create an inventory of economically viable Seasonal Forest Products through an offline mobile based application. An estimate of the volume of production is critical to develop a management plan for sustainable resource extraction and forms the basis for developing a scalable business model for market linkage.

In the long term, stakeholders will be able to use the application to monitor and manage forests at a high temporal and spatial resolution.