Protecting India's forests with satellite location technology

A navigation and positioning chip from wireless company u-blox is at the heart of a new high-tech initiative that protects forests, wildlife and endangered species, and promotes sustainable resource development.

The Indian state of Odisha is larger than most European countries, but 30% of its area is forest, including national parks that are home to protected wildlife, tiger reserves and over 100 species of wild orchid. Now, the Forest Minister of Odisha has unveiled a locally developed handheld GNSS device, the Sxtreo T51 PDA, based on the u-blox M8 GNSS chip, which will be used by thousands of rangers to protect and manage forest resources.

The T51 was developed by India’s Stesalit Systems, which worked with Swiss-based u-blox to create a handheld PDA for the Indian subcontinent, where GNSS can be enhanced by signals from India’s own GAGAN (GNSS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation) system to improve standalone accuracy down to the 2 m range. This potentially makes a u-blox M8-equipped device precise enough to geotag locations of individual trees and animals.

“u-blox provided the right kind of GNSS chips with the features needed for India,” said Hemant Khemka, Stesalit’s managing director.

The 72-channel u-blox M8 chip acquires up to three global navigation satellite systems (GNSS): Galileo, BeiDou and GLONASS, concurrently. This makes it suitable for challenging environments where the sky may be partly obscured by thick forest cover, mountainous terrain or buildings. In addition, the chip is flexible and futureproof, as accuracy upgrades and support for new positioning systems or augmentation systems, such as GAGAN, can be added via firmware updates — even out in the field.

India’s forest rangers and guards will use the rugged T51, which is designed for harsh outdoor conditions, for foot patrol navigation, geospatial validation of forestry accounts, incident reporting, monitoring of poaching and tree felling, and surveying and demarcation of forest land. The Linux- and Android-based T51 provides functions similar to a mobile phone, including communications and a camera, all fully integrated with the u-blox M8’s navigation and location support.

The Odisha Forestry Department is looking to equip 3000 forestry staff with GNSS PDAs so that field offices and the public can keep updated on their work.

Top image courtesy of charly-marion under CC BY-SA 2.0