Forest dept to invite public to pitch in for tree census, count those on pvt properties

The forest department is set to invite public participation to contribute to the tree census, especially in counting the trees on private properties. Officials are finding the task of documentation time-consuming, a year after beginning the census.

As per data on the BBMP website, 32,519 trees have been recorded in various pockets of the city. However, officials at the forest department’s Bengaluru Urban division said a little over 60,000 trees have been counted so far. The exercise began in March 2020 following a high court order, but it was hit by the pandemic and subsequent lockdown for over two months.

S S Ravishankar, Deputy Conservator of Forest, Bengaluru Urban district, said completing the tree census in the entire district was a task that will take years.

“We have taken the task seriously. About 5,000 to 6,000 trees are being added after finishing every round of survey. We estimate that the district has about 1 crore trees. Documenting them, along with GPS coordinates, is a time-consuming process as the work has to be done with limited resources,” he said.

Ravishankar said the department would launch a new app within a week that allows the public to contribute to the survey by taking photos and providing details of the trees along with automatically recorded GPS coordinates.

“The primary focus of the app is on recording trees on private properties. We will have a back-end team that will go through every bit of data sent by users to eliminate duplication or overlapping of data and ensure the information recorded is accurate."

Making data accessible

Though the documents uploaded on the BBMP website provide details on the number of trees, the data is not presented in a user-friendly format. The GPS coordinates for many trees are also missing.

However, Ravishankar said the final set of data will address such issues. “There are many technical problems associated with the geographical information of the trees. We are focussing on the accuracy of the data to ensure that the final outcome will be reliable information on the trees,” he said.