Sustainable Forest Management Techniques

Forests being an indispensable resource play an important role in maintaining the earth's ecological balance. The major contributors of deforestation are logging off of trees (legal or illegal), tree theft, forest fire etc. Large scale deforestation has negative impact on the atmosphere resulting in global warming, flash floods, landslides, drought etc. Due to these adverse effects, forest management department all over the countries have taken steps for monitoring the forest to prevent deforestation. Several surveillance techniques have been employed for monitoring and prevention; they are broadly classified as Ground-based sensing techniques and Remote sensing techniques. Surveillance plays an important role in forest management. It had been used in the past and is still being used for monitoring and information collection. Ground-based techniques generally include surveillance by on-site security staff and mobile patrols monitoring the property by water, land and air (Magrath et al., 2007). Some complementary systems such as Fixed Earth System are also used with observation towers located at strategic points with specialized personnel for observing and detecting the presence of fire. All these systems are expensive and time consuming, requiring a lot of resources. Nowadays, remote sensing technologies are also used like, aerial photographs, automatic video surveillance, wireless surveillance systems and satellite imagery. Satellite imagery is very costly for use in monitoring any illegal activity like trespassers, tree theft and deforestation (if they are able to detect at all). On the other hand, with the technological advancements in wireless communication, various low power, and low cost, small-sized sensors nodes are available which can be readily deployed to monitor environment over vast areas. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) technology is being used widely for monitoring and controlling applications. Currently three main wireless standards are used namely: WiFi, Bluetooth and ZigBee. Amongst them, ZigBee is the most promising standard owing to its low power consumption and simple networking configuration. Wireless sensor network based surveillance systems for remote deployment and control are more cost effective and are easy to deploy at location of interest. They can even reach those areas where satellite signals are not available. Moreover, they can be configured to monitor large areas and they have secure mode of data transmission. Environmentally, WSNs finds immense application in land management, agriculture management, lake water quality management, forest fire detection, tree theft prevention and also in the prevention of deforestation. In addition, WSN system has also been used for strain monitoring in railway bridges. (Bischoff et al., 2009), developed an event based strain