ECO-REGENERATION-A CASE STUDY FOR PUSHKAR VALLEY

Abstract

In the franatic search to provide the basic requirements of life to the growing population, man has started exploiting earth's natural resources unwittingly. Such unplanned activities over the years are not only endangering the very existence of these resources but also causing irreparable damage to our environment. In an effort to produce more to meet t.he rising standards of living, of the everincreasing population, the growing industrialization is creating environmental pollution at scale which is already alarming and beyond our handling capabilites. Unfortunately, the insidious effects of the long term increase of the environmental pollution has not yet been understood by the masses. Infact, very few have concerned themselves with the existing hazards that environmental pollution can cause. An apparent outcome is ecological degradation which is responsible for social, economical and environmental problems. An urgent need, therefore, is to make efforts to restore the ecological balance on the local and regional basis. The term eco-regeneration implies to overall improvement of the natural environment along with the upgrading of the social and economic set up and aims at making the life a little more comfortable. This requires, as' a preliminary step, an efficient use of the land and proper management of the natural resources. For this we need to know the information pertaining to the land in shortest time and be able to monitor the changes that the eco-regeneration activities induce in the area. The conventional techniques of acquiring the desired informations for eco-regeneration and monitoring the same are extremely time consuming and costly. Remote sensing techniques, for such data collection and monitoring has been found to be useful and offer hope that the task can be accomplished quickly and effectively. In this dissertation, techniques of Remote Sensing have been used to study a semi-arid area of Rajasthan near Ajmer to find out the efficacy of this technique in depicting the different land use categories and in monitoring the changes that the eco-regeneration activities, presently going on in the area, have effected. The area has been selected since it menifests typical problems of semi-arid zones of our country for example, desertification, deforestation, overgrazing etc. The results are encouraging and show that interpretation techniques with landsat imageries are capable of giving desired results quickly and effectively. The digital techniques offer better solution, provided a good ground truth verification data is available. It has been found by visual interpretation techniques that dense forests have reduced by 0.11 percent, light forests by 1.28 percent where as the sandy-barren land has increased by 4.02 percent of the total study area,