With the motive of giving practical insights into the forestry field to forestry undergraduates, a workshop and field training entitled “Interactive session and workshop on Forest Inventory and Data Collection” was conducted at the Institute of Forestry, Pokhara, dated from 11th June to 14th June 2022.

The program was hosted by the International Forestry students’ Association-Pokhara (IFSA – Pokhara) with a total of 67 participants, bringing together the experts, educators, and forestry professionals who are currently pursuing their master’s degrees in IOF. The workshop was successful to harness the enthusiasm and experience of participants and reached a wide-ranging consensus by the end of the program. 

The first shift of training was conducted on 11th and 12th June, with 33 students. As a huge number of students  were interested to be a part of the program,  the same training and workshop was conducted as a second shift on 13th and 14th June 2022 with 34 students. The workshop and field training was managed in two sessions to avoid the disturbance of regular classes on each day.

The first session in the morning started from 7:00 AM and continued until 9:00 AM while the evening session began from 4:00 PM to 6 PM. In the morning session, Mr. Aja Rawal and Mr. Amrit Pokharel presented as resource persons. They delivered valuable knowledge on forest inventory and its practices in Nepal along with its application and limitations.

In the evening session, Mr. Amrit Pokharel and Mr. Sangita Bashyal introduced the uses and principles of GPS and its significance in the forestry sector. After that, the boundary survey field study session was conducted around IOF premises and Banpale dada, the forest area of iof pokhara located within IOF area. Mr. Sandesh Dhakal, Ms. Santoshi Pandey and Mr. Saroj Das kindly volunteered to help with the boundary survey field study.

On the second day, we had Mr. Abash Paudel as a resource person for the topic “Digital data collection.” He briefly explained and shared his knowledge in detail about digital data collection and demonstrated the kobo toolbox app. 

We would like to express our sincere gratitude towards the IOF Pokhara administration, Resource persons, and volunteers. We are thankful to all the participants for their active participation, co-operation and learning enthusiasm during the whole program.

The report is written by Suwash Yogi ,the secretary of IFSA-Pokhara; The photos credit to Madhav Dhital, the vice-president of IFSA-Pokhara.