Mapping Fruit Trees, Learning From Community Forestry

This is the kind of question Institute on the Environment Senior Scientist Deepak Ray helps answer. Ray, who conducts research on local-to-global-scale food security, has extensive experience mapping and analyzing cropland around the world. His work helps NGOs, industries, international organizations, and governments make more informed policies while exploring ways to overcome challenges faced in the agriculture and food security sectors.

While at a conference in Oaxaca, Mexico, Ray connected with Ranjan Ghosh, a sustainable agri-food systems and natural resources policy researcher at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Ghosh asked if Ray could map the number of fruit trees in remote areas of India.

“It’s hard to accurately map fruit trees,” says Ray. “Some areas are especially tricky because they don’t have large agricultural plots. They have community-managed forests or fruit trees in their yards. Collectively, these trees can result in a lot of fruit and economic gain for a community, but you can’t properly assess this from a satellite.”

To get a better understanding of the challenge, Ray traveled to India where he met Ghosh’s colleague Pranab Choudhury, a seasoned researcher with years of experience related to natural resources management in the global south and the founder of Landstack, a nonprofit that advances sustainable, inclusive, and just land governance policy and practice.

Choudhury brought Ray to two sites in India: the Kandhamal District in Eastern India and Tuensang District in Northeast India.

In the Kandhamal District’s Kotagarh Wildlife Sanctuary, Ray received a crash course in tribal land management, learning how tribes use fire and selective cutting as forest management instruments. These tools help them protect more valuable trees and encourage specific growth while they maintain other agricultural output and clear the forest.

In the Tuensang District, after a nine-hour drive through winding mountain roads, Ray saw an area that has been managed by tribal communities for centuries – they’re currently planting and developing infrastructure for new trees, such as orange and peach trees, for additional commercial gain. While this region is currently especially hard to reach, Indian highway infrastructure is rapidly expanding, ultimately leading to easier transit between regions.

“The fruit in these regions provides tremendous economical benefit,” says Ray. “Understanding the fruit economy of the forest will help us understand the economic value of the forest. Knowing the economic value could incentivize the Indian government and other stewards to better protect the land.”

The question remained: How hard would it be to map these fruit trees?

“I went to assess and came back with a headache,” says Ray. “So many of these fruit trees grow beneath canopies of much taller trees. Even with a satellite, which is often useful for crop mapping, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish them.”

While mulling over the mapping dilemma, Ray came away with a deeper appreciation of tribal forest management. After reading an article Choudhury and Ghosh had written about how California wildfires, in part, represent the loss of community forest stewardship, Ray was curious if he could show Choudhury examples of similar community forest management in the Midwest.

Ray identified two forest systems within a day’s drive from the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

One system was the Menominee Forest, which has been managed by the Menominee Tribe for more than 150 years. The tribe uses harvesting practices that mimic natural forest processes, with an emphasis on sustained-yield management of timber. Like the Indian communities Ray visited, the Menominee Tribe uses prescribed burnings and cuttings to help trees grow in a desired manner. The Tribe is also blending customary practices with modern GIS tools and scientific forestry for more efficient practices.

“With help from IonE postdoctoral fellow Florenica Pech-Cardenas, who made an introduction, IonE postdoctoral fellow Jaris Emmanuel Veneros Guevara and I brought Choudhury to this forest so he could see that not all forests in the United States are managed in the modern style of growing a forest solely to make a profit,” says Ray.

“Their unique forest management system enables them to maintain their income from pulp and timber while progressively enhancing timber yield and growing stock,” says Choudhury, who also noted how this system has led to enhanced diversity, ecosystem health, and resiliency through an innovative combination of fire, natural regeneration, and maintenance.

Clouquet Forestry Center (CFC), the second forest management system, has served as a forestry research and education site for the University for more than a century. CFC’s current research includes a long-term project that studies the adaptability of native forest species to a changing climate and a continuous forest inventory database launched in 1959 that helps researchers understand forest trends and helps forest stewards make decisions about land and resource management. CFC is also increasingly looking for ways to collaborate with the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

“The common thread in both geographies was a clear acknowledgement and recognition of the value of indigenous people-led forest management,” says Choudhury. “The Menominee Tribe and the Cloquet Forestry Center both showcased the power of cultural burning and other practices that are contextual, place-based, and adaptive, combinations not usually found in mainstream forestry.”

After exploring these forest management systems and gaining new perspectives, Ray returned to the central question of his visit: can researchers map these hidden fruit trees? Ray has been thinking hard about a method and has come up with some potential approaches, including a three-stage approach that involves on-the-ground photography, drone imagery, and satellite imagery. He is in active conversation with Ghosh and Choudhury and hopes to raise seed money for this project when he attends the upcoming India Land Development Conference.

“The goal is to partner with Choudhury to map some areas of the remote forests in India and bring that information to the Indian government to get their support,” says Ray. “I could then apply the developed, proven crop mapping technique to the greater world.”

Ashley Bergman Humphrey is the Research Communications Specialist at the Institute on the Environment.