GIS for Community Forest Management

See the open call on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/datameet/ydqwUa8ZQQI

This is a call for volunteers interested in learning more data management practices while assisting rural communities' efforts to manage their forest lands. Do read and forward to those interested.

Community Forest Management

About the Project

Approximately 1100 villages in Gadchiroli district in Eastern Maharashtra have applied for and received 'Community Forest Rights' (CFR) over the last few years. This means that the Right to Govern land that has been traditionally used by these villages for collection of forest produce is now in their own hands. Earlier, State ownership of forest lands always posed a challenge to sustainable forest management because sale of forest produce could always be controlled by government, which didn't directly have a long term interest in the sustainability of the forests. Village communities in these areas are now coming together to collectively plan for management of the forest resources and livelihoods in the district. Dr. Madhav Gadgil, renowned ecologist and his associates have been in communication with about 50 Gram Sabhas in the region to provide them with capacity building and technical support to catalogue forest resources and prepare forest management plans. Datameet Pune has been in dialogue with Dr. Gadgil on this matter and we have prepared a list of tasks we could assist them with.

Tasks

1. Locating Census Codes of the chosen 1100 villages
2. Extracting tabular data about the villages from various CFR documents (mostly PDFs)
3. Preparing an automated process to develop village maps to go with wikipedia articles that have already developed for each village.
4. Preparing a process so people in the villages can use a GPS app to mark out more details of forest lands in their own villages. This information can then be uploaded and inserted into village maps.
5. Help with preparing a project proposal for translating QGIS to Marathi. This is so people in each village can prepare more detailed maps they can add to the articles.
6. Helping prepare a basic curriculum in GIS data collection and analysis for a diploma course in Community Forest Management for Mumbai University (which will be taught by Dr. Gadgil among others) beginning Feb, 2018

We need help with the above tasks, most of it is volunteer work and some may involve an honorarium. Those interested and willing to commit time please contact us at pune [at] datameet.org. If we have enough volunteers we may do a meetup to work together on this

Best
Craig
DataMeet Pune Chapter