The civic agency, after a delay of nearly four years since a High Court order, had finally set the ball rolling early this month for the tree census and floated tender for enumeration of an estimated 20.8 lakh trees in the city, spread over 9,761.6 sq km.
According to BBMP, the census will only focus on the tree’s girth and species name to be entered into an application developed by the Karnataka Remote Sensing Institute. The application will then generate a unique ID for each tree. “The project is in line with Karnataka High Court’s observations. We need to know the total number of trees that the city is left with. Moreover, the age of a tree can be deduced using the tree’s girth value. Parameters such as canopy diameter and the health of trees are monitored by BBMP’s tree canopy management team.
The city’s green cover is set to bear the brunt of this endeavour, as one corridor alone will account for 62.67 per cent of the total trees lost in Bengaluru last year
However, the census will be in a different avatar, deviating a bit from the full-fledged process as directed by the Karnataka High Court in 2019. According to the officials from the forest department of the BBMP, the census will focus on the number of trees in the city and will document only five parameters - girth, unique tree ID, species name, GPS location, and photograph - of each tree.
According to BBMP DCF, de-concretising trees across the city is a huge task, and the Forest Department is taking up the issue with the Road Infrastructure Department yet again. A drive to deconcretise tree bases will also be launched soon.