Forest Department Staff Being Trained to Use UAVs
<p>The light-weight UAVs have proved to be so successful that over 100 frontline staff of the Forest Department are now being trained to use these devices for marine wildlife monitoring and surveillance under the capacity building objective of the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) programme. </p>
<p>With UAVs, areas that were earlier difficult to access can now be surveyed with relative ease. With Forest Departments actively adopting this technology and forming drone squads to monitor marine wildlife, we can expect that the integration of new technologies will strengthen dugong and other conservation actions along India’s rich marine habitats. The dugong project is under the leadership of Dr. J. A. Johnson and Dr. Nehru Prabakaran from the Wildlife Institute of India and Dr. K. Sivakumar from the Pondicherry University.<br />
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<p><strong>Photo: Sagar Rajpurkar.</strong></p>
