Community-Driven Tree Plantation Monitoring and Survival Analytics Platform

Objective: To enable local NGOs and village communities to coordinate tree plantation drives and accurately track sapling survival rates using a low-cost digital platform.

India's afforestation initiatives often face setbacks due to poor post-plantation monitoring, lack of community engagement, and unreliable survival data, especially in rural and peri-urban areas. This affects the effectiveness of climate action (SDG 13), undermining both environmental and socio-economic benefits for vulnerable communities.

The proposed solution is a mobile-first, multilingual platform that empowers local NGOs, panchayats, and citizen volunteers to collaboratively plan plantation drives, geo-tag sapling locations, and report on their survival status over time. The platform will integrate with open geospatial datasets and use lightweight analytics to provide transparency and actionable insights for all stakeholders.

Key features will include a drive coordination dashboard, GPS-based sapling tagging using OpenStreetMap, offline data entry support, periodic survival surveys via guided forms, and automated analytics visualizing survival rates by species, location, and time. A working prototype will demonstrate real-world use with data from a sample plantation site, using mock and real datasets.

This approach enables data-driven climate action, improves accountability for plantation programs, and makes survival rates publicly auditable. The platform is designed to be scalable and adaptable for use by multiple NGOs and local bodies, with the potential to aggregate data for district-level or state-wide impact measurement.