Environment

Madhya Pradesh to use drones for forest monitoring

This shift toward real-time, tech-enabled forest monitoring is crucial.

Madhya Pradesh has become the first state in India to implement an AI-based real-time forest alert system, designed to detect encroachment, land-use changes, and environmental degradation.

This pioneering initiative marks a significant departure from traditional manual monitoring methods and ushers in a new era of proactive forest governance. The pilot program has been launched across five high-risk divisions—Shivpuri, Guna, Vidisha, Burhanpur, and Khandwa—areas historically vulnerable to illegal tree felling and encroachments.

Central to the system’s architecture is the Google Earth Engine, which processes multi-temporal satellite imagery including Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Dynamic World data.

Through custom machine learning pipelines, the system detects subtle alterations in land cover such as clearing, construction, or vegetation shift, even in areas as small as 100 square meters. Once changes are flagged, alerts are generated and sent through mobile apps directly to field staff, enabling rapid on-site verification.

Following receipt of an alert, forest officers visit the location equipped with a mobile app designed for field reporting. This app supports GPS-tagged images, voice notes, handwritten comments, geofencing capabilities, and distance measurement tools.

With over 20 data points per alert—including satellite indices like NDVI, SAVI, EVI, and SAR—the system ensures that each incident is verified with rich, high-context documentation.

The architecture is reinforced by a real-time dashboard accessible to the Divisional Forest Officer. Alerts are mapped by beat and field post, and can be filtered by date, area, and severity. This enables forest officials and administrators to triage responses dynamically and focus efforts where degradation threats are most acute.

This shift toward real-time, tech-enabled forest monitoring is especially crucial given Madhya Pradesh’s status as India’s forest-richest state—covering 85,724 square kilometers—yet facing the highest annual loss of forest land, estimated at over 612 square kilometers as per the 2023 Forest Survey of India. The AI system’s ability to detect actionable threats quickly promises to substantially reduce delays in response and conserve critical forest landscapes.

Looking ahead, forest officials plan to expand the alert system statewide, making it a cornerstone of proactive conservation. The model’s self-improving architecture—where verified field feedback informs algorithm updates—sets the stage for increasingly accurate, transparent, and scalable forest management.