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IAPRS & SIS, Vol.34, Part 7, "Resource and Environmental Monitoring". Hyderabad, India.2002 
  
2. STUDY AREA 
The study area is the Mandakini sub-watershed of the 
Alaknanda catchment in the Grhwal and lies between 78° 48’ 
26" - 79° 21’ 13” E longitutudes and 30° 16” 30” - 30° 49° 15” 
N latitudes. The study area comprises snow-free valleys to the 
sky-scraping peaks with perpetual snow and glaciers. The biotic 
environment best expresses itself in flora and fauna, the forest 
being slightly more than half of the sub-watershed. The rest of 
the land is under agriculture or covered by snow clad and 
barren rocky areas mottled with patches of grasslands and 
scrublands. The alpine pastures are endowed with rich varieties 
of grass, shrubs and herbs of medicinal value. Paddy, millets 
and potatoes are mainly Kbarif (winter) crops while wheat is the 
major Rabi (summer) crop. The terraces made on sloping 
hillsides are the main fields of cultivation. Animal husbandry 
plays an important role in sustaining the local population. 
However, the quality of the livestock is poor. Kedarnath is the 
most important place of worship in the valley that attracts 
tourist inflow during May to October. 
3. OBJECTIVE 
The main objective of the investigation is to arrive at utilisation 
pattern of fodder and fuel wood resources use. The following 
are the detailed steps in achieving the objective: 
* To analyse resource use or consumption pattern after 
stratification of villages for socio-economic data 
collection based upon altitudinal range, distance to 
resource and distance to road-head 
* To estimate the resource availability; a derivative 
from land cover/vegetation map in conjunction with 
field estimations 
* To analyse the availability and consumption to arrive 
at resource utilisation pattern 
4. DATA USED 
IRS LISS-III data in. the form of FCC transparency, geo-coded 
paper prints and digital data of March and October, 1999 were 
used. Village-wise socio-economic data for sampled villages on 
consumption pattern collected by an extensive door-to-door 
survey. Village maps with distinct village code have been 
procured from census Directorate. Survey of India 
topographical maps on 1:50 000 scale of the study area were 
referred for base features for the preparation of land 
cover/vegetation maps. From the published literature, figures 
for Net Above Ground Primary Productivity for various land 
cover/vegetation classes encountered in the study area. 
S. METHODOLOGY 
To meet the above objective it is required to estimate/compute 
the resource availability and on the other hand village-wise 
consumption/requirement. These tasks are achieved in the 
following steps as shown in the figure. 1. 
675 
5.1 Land cover/vegetation Map 
Base information of the study area was extracted from the SOI 
topographical maps on 1:50 000 scale. The IRS LISS-III FCCs 
were optically enlarged and projected on to the base map and 
preliminary land cover/vegetation maps were prepared using the 
elements of photo-interpretation. Latter, ground-truth data on 
various land cover categories was collected to make an 
interpretation key, which was subsequently used to make final 
maps. 
5.2 Fodder Estimation 
Several studies have been conducted in the Central Himalayas 
pertaining to biomass and productivity of forests and grassland 
ecosystems (Tiwari, 1979; Singh and Saxena, 1980; Melkania 
and Tandon, 1984; Joshi, 1988; Joshi and Srivastava, 1988; 
Ram ef al, 1989; Rawat, 1990; Joshi, 1991; Rikhari ef al, 1992; 
and Singh et al, 1994), Some of these studies have also given 
strata-wise (tree layer, shrub layer and herb layer) Net 
Aboveground Primary Productivity (ANPP) as well as optimal 
biomass for sustainable extraction for fodder These values have 
been used in this investigation and are given in table 1. 
BATULLITE Cu TA : OTHER So er. 
4 a + * 
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GETRAL § TI May aah AZAITY VLLL AUC Cea AM DICA o6 
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Figure 1.An approach for fodder availability-demand in the 
Mandakini sub-watershed 
5.3 Stratification of Villages 
There are 451 villages (+non-revenue land) in the Mandakini 
sub-watershed. For the purpose of socio-economic data 
collection these villages were stratified into clusters based on 
altitude, distance from road head and distance from resource, 
To achieve this, the contour layer (from Digital Charts of World 
— ESRI, 1993), land cover/vegetation layer, road network and 
village boundaries layers have been used. From the contour 
layer, altitudinal ranges were segregated and assigned a code for 
each range. The labels of land cover/vegetation layer were 
separately saved as point layer. Latter, proximity analysis was 
done to assess the settlement locations (point feature) with 
resource by using overlay techniques. Similarly, settlement 
locations (point feature) were subjected to proximity analysis 
with road network (line feature) to assess the distance of 
settlement locations to road-head. Subsequently, all these three 
layers were integrated by using overlay techniques, which 
segregated the settlement locations based on multi-criteria 
based clustering. Each stratum indicate similar resource use 
pattern. The stratification of villages helped in choosing the 
appropriate number of samples (in all 52) from each stratum for 
the collection of socio-economic data, which was consolidated 
for each village.