Pralad Yonzon Conservation Forum- 118
- By : resourceshimalaya.org
- March 9, 2023
Resources Himalaya Foundation and Environmental Graduates in Himalaya successfully organized 118th series of Pralad Yonzon Conservation Forum (PYCF) with Dr. Upama Ashish Koju, Senior Researcher at Forest Action Nepal. Currently, she is affiliated to Kathmandu University as a visiting faculty for M.Sc. in Geo-informatics. She gave a talk on “Exploring Nepal’s forest biomass and its Net Primary Productivity with remote sensing approaches”.
Dr. Upama Ashish Koju,explained that Geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing provide insights into the safety and security of infrastructures, allowing researchers to identify and detect natural and human-caused threats. The visual information they process can also help professionals view changes in infrastructure and mitigate structural risks. The applications of remote sensing include land-use mapping, weather forecasting, environmental study, natural hazards study, and resource exploration. She highlighted the usage of remote sensing by comparing the indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). NDVI employs the multi-spectral remote sensing data technique to find vegetation index, land cover classification, vegetation, water bodies, open area, scrub area, hilly areas, agricultural area, thick forest, thin forest with few band combinations of the remote sensed data. On the other hand, NDWI is known to be strongly related to the plant water content, which makes it a very good proxy for plant water stress.
After a very informative presentation, some queries were raised by the audience in the discussion session during which was duly answered by Dr. Koju. She concluded the talk by mentioning the importance of Remote Sensing and GIS in the local and regional scale. The program ended with a vote of thanks from Dr. Gauri Shankar Bhandari, Research Fellow at Resources Himalaya Foundation.
