Science & Technology - Nagaland

Wasteland Monitoring Project

Since mapping of wastelands were carried out using different years satellite datasets (1986 – 2000), the Ministry of Rural Development requested NRSC to update these maps by using one time data sets for year 2003. New wasteland classification will help in wastelands reclamation programs considering the severity of wastelands. The maps will help to retrieve the information at village / watershed (500 ha.) level, for implementation of wastelands / watershed programmes. Therefore, convergence of data sets to evolve a decision support system at policy makers level has become very important. It becomes necessary to understand wastelands with respect to land degradation classes in terms of definition of classes, comparative classification metrics and suggested use of such information for decision makers.

The basic objective of the project was to Update the spatial information on wasteland considering the 2003 vectors, identification and delineation of new areas under wastelands, Identify areas where reclamation has been done and Extraction of statistics and summation in the form of report and atlas.

About six wastelands categories were identified and mapped in this study. The maps thus prepared provided gross estimation of wastelands in Nagaland and their spatial distribution. The wasteland layer that was generated using the data of 2003 formed the primary legacy layer which was updated using 2006 LISS III data.