Bindusagar lake in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, June 19: When water bodies inside the reserve forests of Dhenkanal and Angul districts dried up last summer causing the death of more than three elephants, the forest department had planned to dig up more ponds in the elephant corridors.

Now, with the availability of a ‘State Wetland Atlas’, the department can better plan its strategy to provide water to the elephants and other big animals in summer.

The State Wetland Atlas can also help the water resources department to know the status of the water bodies and their recharge areas, man-made wetlands for irrigation by the irrigation department, sites for freshwater aquaculture development useful for entrepreneurs and fisheries department and the development of eco-tourism sites jointly by the tourism and forests and environment department.

Developed by city-based Orissa Space Applications Centre (ORSAC) and Ahmedabad-based Space Application Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the wetland atlas of Orissa contains detailed information on 12,266 wetlands with their entire areas, boundaries, water spread, aquatic vegetation and turbidity. In addition, it has also listed 66,174 small wetlands (less than 2.25 hectare size).

Chief executive of ORSAC, A.K. Mohapatra said: “Besides the forest officials, the atlas can be useful for industrial houses to know if there is any designated water body on their premises.

“Town planners and development authorities, municipalities, municipal corporations, notified area councils and even gram panchayats can know about the location of water bodies so that they can work on their conservation and be on alert, so that development activities do not affect the wetlands any more.”

ORSAC, working under the science and technology department of the state government, in collaboration with the ISRO centre in Ahmedabad, has worked under the National Wetland Inventory and Assessment Project of the Union ministry of environment and forests.

The mapping has been done at a 1:50,000 resolution by analysing digital satellite images of the Indian Remote Sensing satellite. The atlas would be uploaded on the ORSAC website later.

“The atlas has state and district-level data. It has covered around 6,90,904 hectare inland water bodies. Interestingly, both inland natural and man-made wetlands share approximately the same areas, i.e. about 34 and 32 per cent of area covered under wetlands. Out of 24 per cent of coastal wetlands, the natural ones accounted for about 20 per cent,” said a senior scientist of the space application centre.

“Wetlands including the man-made ones are vital for maintaining a balance in the local ecosystem. While they act in providing livelihood in many places by producing fish, they also work in fold control, transport, storm water protection and even water purification,” said ecologist Bijay Mishra of the city-based organisation Vasundhara.

Terming the inland water bodies as “nature’s kidneys” Mishra added that the State Wetland Atlas would help all stakeholders in planning, decision-making and especially helping keep the ground water table healthy.

“Local inland water bodies do help in restoring the ground water.

“So this atlas will be of great help for the state when the entire administration is eager to market industrialisation as its unique selling proposition,” he added.

“The degraded status of the wetlands in the bigger cities — especially focused with real estate activities — has been a cause of concern for environmentalists in the state. “This atlas will thus help in knowing the status of the present position of the wetlands with the satellite data taken sometime back,” he said.