Thread by @rajbhagatt

India - State of #forest report from Forest Survey is out. If you get news articles (how forest covr increased/decreased), read it with caution. Will write detailed comments later, but some small fun for now:

In ch-13 maps, they have given Shaksgam away! Illegal to publish..
1/n

They had some city level maps of forests.. And their statistics depended on boundary files and the file for Mumbai is riddled with gaps between subdivisions. There are white patches in between because someone didnt digitize it properly and these errors creep into stats

For the other major cities, the boundaries used were municipal corporation boundaries but for Bengaluru alone they have used planning area boundary (BDA has a larger area than BBMP and covers some forest patches). Comparison shown below and this would affect numbers

And looks like the reports carry forward the same methodology used in previous reports which overreports forests. Eg: In the snapshot of Kanniyakumari district below, areas covered by Coconut, Rubber plantations are labelled as "forests". Will write in depth about this later

A detailed analysis on the results is also difficult to do as the maps cost 2000 Rupees for every 1 degree by 1 degree grid cell. Roughly 7-8 lakh rupees for the entire country.

And it comes with lots of restrictions. Even after one buys the data, the person cant copy from the CD 🤣 Considering that my laptop has no CD drive, I would have to buy an external drive.

Data policies are weird.

Anyway, I will write a more detailed thread about the methodology later..

For now, exercise caution!

I have to read through their definitions of "tribal districts" etc. In Tamil Nadu, they have classified Tiruchirappalli as a tribal district! In Census 2011, Trichy had 0.67% tribal population. 🤔

Update: State of the Forest report is no longer available in official website!