Every weekend, several residents of Pune in India set out to map trees along the city’s riverbanks. It’s not just a weekend hobby; it’s meant to serve as evidence to protect the city’s greenery when developmental projects come up in the area, reports contributor Stephin Thomas for Mongabay.
The volunteers are from Pune River Revival, a grassroots movement that formed in response to the Pune Riverfront Development Project, which aims to create promenades, recreational spaces, and infrastructure along the Mula and Mutha rivers. The project is estimated to cost around 47 billion rupees (about $500 million).
“Personally, I want to protect the environment, but without this data, we cannot even grasp how much damage has already occurred,” Raghunandan Patil, a volunteer with the group, told Mongabay. “So to any nature lover, this gives an idea on what’s left to be saved. Apart from this, tree mapping provides evidence to present to the government or authorities when advocating for sustainable alternatives.”
Patil said the group had been manually mapping the trees for a while, but began doing so more systematically in 2024 using the citizen-science app iNaturalist. The app allows all the data to be easily accessible and documented in specific projects.
Such detailed documentation has already helped the group highlight the importance of some areas, such as the Ram-Mula Devrai, a sacred grove located at the confluence of the Ram and Mula rivers. This small forest patch is said by local communities to be the home of a village deity.
According to official reports, the grove is home to some 1,000 old-growth “heritage” trees and hundreds of animal species, including the Bengal monitor (Varanus bengalensis) and checkered keelback snake (Fowlea piscator).
“We documented the Ram-Mula Devrai to highlight its ecological value to both the public and local authorities, rather than letting those trees be cut down,” Patil said. “We organized butterfly walks, insect walks, tree-painting competitions and other sustainable activities. We gave an alternative to the government that the area could be commercialized sustainably instead of clear-cutting the forest. As a result, that stretch now faces a much lower risk of heavy development.”
Ashok D. Ghorpade, joint municipal commissioner and chief garden superintendent with the Pune municipal authority, told Mongabay that the city conducts regular tree censuses every five years using the latest mapping technologies, including geographic information systems (GIS).
“The process involves field-level enumeration and geo-tagging of individual trees, recording relevant attributes such as species, trunk girth, height, geographical coordinates and photographs, and compiling the collected information into a GIS-based digital database,” Ghorpade said.
He added the city welcomes the volunteers’ data “as supplementary information during the tree census process.”
Read the full story by Stephin Thomas here.
Banner image: Vivek Lanjewar capturing the resin coming out of a moringa tree. Image by Stephin Thomas.
