Pakistan has been blessed with favourable climate conditions to exploit its natural resources in order to boost volume of productivity in agriculture sector. This was stated by Professor Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan, Vice Chancellor UAF while addressing the 20-member delegation of Agricultural Scientists, Experts and Farmers of Balochistan Province headed by National Expert FAO Ijaz Hussain Malik at New Rest House of the University here on Tuesday.
Dr Iqrar maintained that natural resources mapping techniques like remote sensing and digital image processing as well as GIS are key to revamp our agronomic strategies and agricultural planning. He urged the scientists to switch over satellite technologies for the forecasting procedures for available land and water resources of the country.
VC UAF added that Balochistan has great potential for the cropping intensity as well as for bringing food security and agricultural revolution in the country. He said that UAF has been providing human resource development services to all provinces particularly Balochistan Province as well. He expressed his concern over forth coming disastrous threat likely to be occurred by global warming and climate change scenario, which needs to redesign our strategies on war footing basis.
Professor Dr Rai Niaz Ahmad, Dean Faculty of Agri Engineering & Tech. UAF highlighted the initiatives taken by his faculty regarding introduction of modern technological approaches particularly remote sensing and digital image processing. He maintained that UAF is striving to equip young scientists with update knowledge of satellite remote sensing for mapping and monitoring earth resources which has great potential for manifold increase in the availability of paper based and digital data originating from great variety of satellite launched by many developing and developed countries.
He maintained that it is need for hour to understand the underlying principles of this relatively new tool that is increasingly being adopted by many natural resources monitoring agencies at local national and international levels. Dr Waqar Ahmad, Principal Research Scientist Common Wealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Australia, threw light on physical basis of remote sensing, characteristics and the working mechanism of various sensor systems and visual inter-petition of colour composite satellite images.
He also highlighted the importance of digital image processing including image enhancement, management, rectification and image transformation, classification and accuracy assessment techniques. Dr Waqar also threw light on application of theoretical concepts by working on real life problem areas such as flood/land use mapping, Agricultural Crops Monitoring, Natural Resource Management, Deforestation and Water Resource Monitoring Aspects. Ijaz Hussain Malik, National Expert FAO and Dr Muhammad Irshad also spoke on the occasion. Vice Chancellor, Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan distributed gifts among the participants.