1 year on, project to document sacred groves under way

“MMVS completed 25 years this year and hence we decided to revive the work on devrais as a tribute to this organisation’s founder, eminent botanist VD Vartak and launched Mission Devrai,” said Sunil Bhide, working president, MVS, adding that since the past one year they have propagated the cause through lectures, slide shows, photo exhibition and cycle rallies. In the second week of January, they are conducting a lecture in Modern College.

Some of the objectives that Mission Devrai aims to achieve are: to facilitate in policy making for conservation of devrais; create public awareness regarding devrais; highlight the deteriorating condition of the sacred groves; create an easy-to-access database; and management of information on devrais.

Under the project, villages nearest to the devrai have been identified and segregated from the existing database. The locations of ‘devrai’ in these villages were marked on Google Earth data based on – density and extent of forest over the years, visibility of a temple, and visibility of foot track or road access to the devrai.
Once the locations of devrais were marked on Google Earth the placemarks were saved in a digital file and were converted to a shapefile – a digital data storage format for storing the location, shape and attributes of geographic features – for further analysis. Based on the shapefile, high-resolution satellite images were procured for further interpretation. These satellite images were used to mark the actual area of the devrais in Autodesk Map – a mapping software.

Talking about the challenges in the project, Abhijit Khandge, a member of MVS, said the process used for identification though accurate, has certain limitations. For instance, it becomes difficult to segregate a devrai at places where there is dense forest. Besides, over the years due to deforestation the trees in the devrai no longer exist to the required density. Various factors for identification are not discernible” “The devrai is very small consisting of very few trees. In such cases it becomes important that the information is verified from ground resources. Earlier we thought the project can be executed sitting in a computer lab but later realised that it needed extensive field work. The survey teams verified the locations of such devrais from ground and noted the exact latitude-longitude; additional information was also gathered from the locals. Based on these the original data had to be corrected and update”,” he added.

A significant information added to the database was regarding the preservation of the devrais. For this, temporal comparison of satellite images was carried out. Images of different vintages were compared with reference to the changes that have taken place over the years. The status of the devrai at each period was compared and noted, and the same was added to the database” “In the near future, a team of botanists will be visiting the identified areas to study flora-fauna,” said Khandge.