Once the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which assists the Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation (MoFSC) in forest fire management, begins to directly receive satellite images showing wildfires in Nepal, forest authorities would be able to take prompt actions to control such fires. [break]
According to Sudip Pradhan, a GIS development specialist with ICIMOD, once the new system comes into effect, possibly by the end of this week, forest authorities will receive detailed information about wildfires in just 15 minutes after any of two NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, flies over Nepal.
Until now, the ICIMOD needs two to three hours to inform forest authorities about wildfires detected by the NASA satellites.
“As of now, we depend on the NASA’s website to download satellite images showing wildfires in Nepal, which is a time-consuming process,” explained Pradhan. “Our new system enables us to receive satellite images from the NASA satellites directly, which makes it possible for us to receive and send information about wildfires in just 15 minutes.”
Pashupati Koirala, forest management officer at the Department of Forest, said, “Quick dissemination of information about wildfires would help us control them.”
According to Koirala, district forest officers (DFOs) of all 75 districts in the country and wardens of major protected areas like Chitwan National Park (CNP) and Shukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve get regular notifications about wildfires through SMSes and e-mails. “Once the DFOs receive fire alerts, they inform concerned range posts and coordinate with Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs).”
In addition to the DFOs and conservation officials, ICIMOD has been sending fire alerts to focal persons of the Federation of Community Forest Users Nepal (FECOFUN) in all 75 districts.
In a bid to fight forest fire more effectively in future, ICIMOD is planning to have a system to send email notifications about fires to general people as well. “Shortly, anyone concerned about forest fires can receive fire alerts,” said Pradhan. “All they need to do is to sign up on our website.”
Fire notifications sent by ICIMOD can be useful in controlling wildfire as they contain minute geographical details of fires like longitude, latitude, district, VDCs and even ward numbers. Fires detected by the NASA satellites are carefully studied before forest authorities, conservation officials and FECOFUN focal persons are informed.
To receive satellite images directly from the NASA website, ICIMOD had set up a MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) date receiving station on January 10 this year. ICIMOD had started sending fire alerts through SMSes and emails from last year.
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