ANANTNAG: J&K Forest Department today organized a one-day training programme on e-Green Watch Technologies for the officials of South Forest Circle at Forest Complex Bijbehara, here.

On the occasion, 15 Forest officials were trained in the use of GPS, sampling technologies, and KMZ file uploading on the National Green Portal.

Addressing the participants in the inaugural session of the training programme, Conservator of Forests, South Forest Circle Irfan Ali Shah said that in this era of rapid technological changes and innovations it becomes imperative that forest officials and frontline forest personnel are trained in latest technologies like use of Global Positioning System, remote sensing, Drone based forest surveillance Technology, Fire mappers, Compartment Information System, e-green watch etc. to facilitate real time information sharing for better protection and management of forests.

He informed that online portals like e-Green Watch are all web based and are user friendly applications that are transparent, reliable and accountable. He said use of integrated e-governance portals like e-Green watch enables understanding of temporal change detection for the effective online monitoring and evaluation of works in the forestry sector.

He emphasized that LIDAR, RFIDs, Bodycams, Web based seed dispersing UAVs and Artificial Intelligence are the part of future forestry. He said that advanced Forest technologies like them are also important to sustainable forest management especially in the wake of the current harvesting rate of forests globally. Technology based sustainable forest management will become increasingly important in the coming years and will be key to human survival.

The resource persons including Range officers Saleem Ajaz Mughal and Sajad Khaki, demonstrated the features of e-Green Watch system including site identification, site selection using various parameters, plantation project preparation, work estimates, plantation work progress etc.