Geospatial Technology for Natural Resource Management

The first stage in developing a sustainable resource development strategy is to assess the resources' availability and condition. Assessing the baseline rates or levels of various phenomena, as well as establishing the trends in these measures or conditions, identifying the sources of rates and trends, and assessing the consequences of these rates or trends are all steps in the assessment process. A third component, mitigation, indicates the policies or directives that must be implemented as a result of the incident. Modern geospatial technologies, such as Remote Sensing (RS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Global Positioning Systems (GPS), have provided extremely powerful methods for surveying, identifying, classifying, mapping, monitoring, and characterizing various resources, both renewable and nonrenewable, living and nonliving in nature. An essential part of remote sensing is determining, increasing, and monitoring the overall capacity of the Earth through the use of geospatial data. Global environmental protection, disaster reduction, and sustainable development depend on satellite observations of land, oceans, and the atmosphere, particularly during natural and human-induced events. When using space-based sensors for remote sensing, it is possible to gather both repetitive (ranging from minutes to days) and global (covering the entire globe) data. Crop inventory and forecasts, drought and flood damage assessment, land use monitoring, and management are just a few of the possible uses for these data. For many applications relevant to national development, India has become a leading provider of observational data in a wide range of resolutions in many geographical, spectral, and temporal dimensions. In order to identify a geographic location and describe the context, GPS gives worldwide positionally accurate coordinates. GPS is an important monitoring tool since it can repeatedly collect data about the Earth's characteristics and phenomena at a low cost. As a result of GIS's ability to visualize geospatial data, we are able to communicate complicated information, such as natural resources, in a way that is both convenient and effective. As a further benefit, GIS can generate, edit, store, and analyse vital spatial data for planning and decision-making purposes. An important development in technology has made it possible to examine environmental and natural resource challenges in a spatial perspective. When it comes to solving problems, GIS provides the ability to model diverse phenomena and examine their interaction, for example, in a place-based context, so that we may evaluate complex and integrated concerns from local to global dimensions.

Shruti Kanga, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Centre for Land Resource Management, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi. Her main areas of interest include forest fire risk modeling and management, tourism, and resource management. She has attended and organized over 35 national and international conferences. She has over 12 years of teaching and research experience. She was also the course coordinator for different modules of the EDUSAT based distance learning program organized by the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO Indian Space Research Organization, Government of India.

Gowhar Meraj, PhD, works in the field of remote sensing, watershed management, hydrology, disaster risk assessment and mitigation, simulation modelling, and spatial analysis. He is the principal investigator of a Department of Science and Technology, Government of India sponsored research project where he assesses the impact of climate change on the critical ecosystem services of the Kashmir Valley. His work is with INVEST modelling for assessing sediment retention services, water yield services, and habitat quality in the Kashmir valley. He has more than 40 research publications.

Suraj Kumar Singh, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Centre for Land Resource Management, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi. He over 12 years of teaching and research experience in the areas of waterlogging and flood hazards, geospatial applications in water resources, disaster management, hydrogeomorphology, urban planning, and wasteland mapping. He was previously a course coordinator for different modules of the EDUSAT based distance learning program organized by the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Indian Space Research Organization, Government of India.

Majid Farooq, PhD, is a working scientist in the Department of Ecology, Environment and Remote Sensing, Government of Jammu and Kashmir, India. He has more than 15 years of experience in research, teaching, and consultancy related to remote sensing and GIS such as climate change vulnerability assessments, flood modeling, ecosystem assessment, watershed management, natural resource management, ecosystem services, and modeling.

M. S. Nathawat, PhD, is a scientist of international repute. He has more than 150 publications in various international and national journals. His primary areas of research include remote sensing, natural resource management, environmental assessments, desertification, remote sensing and GIS, natural resources management, physical geography, regional and urban planning, environmental geomorphology, climate change and disaster management. He is also a member of expert committees in various national bodies.