Vegetation Survey Undertaken Using Automatically Located Photographs during Horse Trek in the Dachigam National Park, India

An efficient way is needed to undertake large scale monitoring of grassland vegetation. Satellite images or aero-photographs are very useful for this purpose, but extensive ground truth data are required to make accurate analysis and interpretation. However, obtaining large-scale information from detailed vegetation surveys by manually deter-mining species composition is difficult and costly. As an alternative to traditional land-based methods, we used a GPS digital camera that determines locations automatically and captures pictures for vegetation survey. Our testing was done in the Dachigam National Park where grassland has been heavily grazed by goat, sheep, and cattle (Hasegawa et al, 2012). Hence, evaluating the variations in grassland conditions in the large area of the national park is important.