The drones would help the government to watch over illegal activities like poaching and tree felling.
The Maharashtra government is planning to deploy drones for the aerial monitoring of illicit activities in forests, like tree felling, trespassing and poaching.
The Pench tiger project, located near Nagpur, is the first in Maharashtra and the second in India after the Panna tiger project in Madhya Pradesh to procure an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for conservation. The forest authorities are using the drone, which has a mounted camera, to get an aerial view of the park and prevent poaching, illegal entry, tree-felling and fishing in the Pench reservoir.
Maharashtra finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar, who is also the state's forest minister, told dna that they planned to deploy UAVs, conventional camera traps and camera traps powered on solar energy in protected areas. "We can use drones at all places, but in stages," he added.
"We will have to take permissions from the Government of India. This will help us in surveillance," said Mungantiwar, adding that the Tadoba Andhari tiger reserve, which has a rich tiger ecosystem — and accounts for the highest number of tigers in Maharashtra — will be one of the sites where these drones will be used.
He said the state forest department wanted to upgrade all tiger projects to "very good" ratings through better conservation and protection efforts. The solar-powered camera traps would do away with the need to replace the batteries of the conventional ones, which are used for surveillance and keeping a count of animals like tigers. A tiger census using camera traps is more sophisticated than one with conventional methods like counting pug marks.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority has inked an MoU with the Wildlife Institute of India for drone-based monitoring in five tiger reserves of Panna, Jim Corbett National Park, Kaziranga, Sundarbans and Sathyamangalam.
"In landscapes like Corbett and Melghat with hills and undulating terrain, drones will be useful," noted Dinesh Tyagi, chief conservator of forests and project director of the Melghat tiger project, adding that the aerial view would help where patrolling on the ground was difficult due to the terrain. The UAVs will also stream real-time pictures.
Tyagi said they would have good aerial penetration in the summers as the foliage would not be too thick. As post-monsoon penetration could pose a problem due to a thicker green canopy, the drones could be customised on requirement. He pointed out that drones were being used for wildlife conservation in Russia (for the Amur tiger), Nepal, South Africa and the US.
Tyagi said that they had proposed the use of drones for aerial monitoring in their tiger conservation plan. Kedar Gore, director, The Corbett Foundation, stressed that it was essential to focus on issues like where the drones needed to be deployed, the need for training staff and taking action when any illegal activities (like trespassing or poaching) were detected.
"Vidarbha is a promising tiger landscape, so drones can be deployed there," he added. Maharashtra has six tiger reserves including the ones at Tadoba, Melghat, Pench, Nagzira, Sahyadri and Bor. It has six national parks, 47 wildlife sanctuaries and four conservation reserves with a tiger population of around 190 in 2014, up from 169 in 2010. The tiger census, results for which were released in 2014, have said India has 2,226 tigers, up from 1,706 in 2010.
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