Deforestation is one of the major challenges faced in Pakistan, that induces climate change, which in turn is having an adverse effect not only on the country's agricultural sector but also has ramifications related to global warming, flash floods, ever-increasing landslides, and reduced tourism. Given the current situation of our forest management system which relies on manual forest-data logging techniques, can result in loss of data over time and inaccessibility of essential data. Therefore, there is a need for a central automatic system that can monitor and produce actionable statistics that can be used further for key decision making.

For this purpose, the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering has collaborated with World Wide Fund (WWF), to develop an android-based mobile application which exploits the rise of 4G connectivity in Pakistan, so that it can be deployed in remote forest environments. For this task, a team from the Department of Computer Science has worked to create a robust software that can use computer vision to find relevant data from trees across Pakistan’s forests. 

This application communicates with cloud-based system, where state-of-the-art deep-learning-based models have been deployed, to estimate crucial forest management statistics such as number of trees, and cumulative carbon content in trees. The application will assist foresters to effectively gather forest data, analyze it, and represent it at a central repository. Thus, creating the process of decision making a lot easier and faster. The application may be extended further to include other vital features required for intelligent forest inventory and healthier growth management.

Effective monitoring of forests will assist in growth of denser forests, increased employment opportunities, boosting tourism, and driving local economy.