Satellites insufficient for patrolling India’s forests, according to official

Nature : Although the Forest Survey of India (FSI) says the country is managing well to protect its forests from excessive logging and land development, one of the FSI’s directors, Ranjit Gill, questions that assertion. He alleges that illegal tree felling and coal mining have been going unreported in several regions. And Gill is not alone in his belief that the country’s forests are being surreptitiously depleted. “The ongoing loss and attrition of native forest in India is quite widespread, although it isn’t being captured by the government’s satellite data on forest cover,” said William Laurance, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Australia. Part of the problem is that the FSI is using a remote-sensing satellite whose low-resolution instruments can cover very large areas but only provide very coarse images. Gill is arguing for more on-the-ground surveys to supplement the satellite data.