North Eastern Region (NER) of India comprising of eight states considered to be most unique and one of the most challenging regions to govern due to its unique physiographic condition, rich biodiversity, disaster prone and diverse socio-economic characteristics. Operational Remote Sensing services increased manifolds in the region with the establishment of North Eastern Space Applications Centre (NESAC) in the year 2000. Since inception, NESAC has been providing remote sensing services in generating inventory, planning and developmental activities, and management of natural resources, disasters and dissemination of information and services through geo-web services for NER. The operational remote sensing services provided by NESAC can be broadly divided into three categories viz. natural resource planning and developmental services, disaster risk reduction and early warning services and information dissemination through geo-portal services.As a apart of natural resources planning and developmental services NESAC supports the state forest departments in preparing the forest working plans by providing geospatial inputs covering entire NER, identifying the suitable culturable wastelands for cultivation of silkworm food plants, mapping of natural resources such as land use/land cover, wastelands, land degradation etc. on temporal basis.In the area of disaster risk reduction, NESAC has initiated operational services for early warning and post disaster assessment inputs for flood early warning system (FLEWS) using satellite remote sensing, numerical weather prediction, hydrological modeling etc.; forest fire alert system with actionable attribute information; Japanese Encephalitis Early Warning System (JEWS) based on mosquito vector abundance, pig population and historical disease intensity and agriculture drought monitoring for the region.The large volumes of geo-spatial databases generated as part of operational services are made available to the administrators and local government bodies for better management, preparing prospective planning, and sustainable use of available resources. The knowledge dissemination is being done through online web portals wherever the internet access is available and as well as offline space based information kiosks, where the internet access is not available or having limited bandwidth availability. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive study on the remote sensing services operational in NER of India for natural resources management, disaster risk reduction and dissemination of information and services, in addition to outlining future areas and direction of space applications for the region.
Land evaluation procedure given by FAO for soil site suitability for various land utilization types for rainfed agriculture has been used to assess the land suitability for khasi mandarin orange and pineapple in East Khasi Hills District of Meghalaya. The database on soil and land use/land cover was generated from IRS-P6 remote sensing satellite data, soil survey and laboratory analysis of soil samples to perform an integrated analysis in the Geographic Information System environment. Different soil chemical parameters and physical parameters were considered to evaluate soil site suitability for orange & pineapple. Different thematic layers were derived from soil map by using ArcGIS software. Subsequently all of them were overlaid and integrated in GIS environment and suitability criteria was applied to the resulted composite map and generated land suitability map for orange and pineapple. The result indicated that the soil sites of the study area are highly to marginally suitable for mandarin orange whereas it is marginally suitable for pineapple. The study reveals that highly suitable areas for orange are found in the Cherapunjee and Mawsynram area that covers 34.5 Sq.Km areas. Moderately suitable (37% of TGA) and marginally suitable (24% of TGA) areas are found only because of slope constraint (8% -30% slope). The hills with deep gorges and ravines on the southern portion of the district is found not suitable for orange plantation because of steep slopes (>30%) and stoniness. Land suitability analysis for pineapple showed that 81% area of total geographical area of the district is marginally suitable and 19% area is not suitable to support the crop. The district is marginally suitable because of topography (slope and erosion), soil fertility (base saturation and CEC) and climate.
Orange orchards of Meghalaya are small in size and are found together with other plants on the slopes of hills. It is also reported that the productivity of orchards is declining in some parts of the state. Therefore in this study, we have attempted to map areas prone to citrus productivity decline based on the integrated effect of soil erosion, vegetation condition and moisture stress. It is difficult to identify orchards on hilly terrain using standard FCC of IRS-P6 LISS III data. Hence, an enhanced color composite image was prepared from three images generated from indices namely SBI, NDWI and NDVI. This enhanced color image was classified using the maximum likelihood classification method and enabled identifying villages prone to citrus decline. The study shows that orchards of 29 villages which are suffering from moisture stress and mostly located on steep slopes that cause heavy soil loss leading to nutrient imbalances are prone to citrus decline. These data will be useful in mapping potential citrus decline areas over zones having similar climatic conditions so that the concerned state horticulture/agriculture departments and citrus growers can take necessary remedial actions.
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