The Water Resources Department (WRD) plans to carry out digital survey of Cooum and Adyar rivers to understand and monitor the land use changes along the waterways.
The Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) will be used to provide better accuracy of the river boundaries. Officials said the process would save teams of time-consuming process of manual demarcation of the boundaries during every project.
The survey using DGPS would help map the river boundaries and geotag land and revenue maps. The teams managing the rivers or implementing projects would be able to identify land use changes along the rivers in future.
Encroachments could be identified and prevented at an earlier stage using the survey as a record, the officials said. The department had cleared most of the encroachments within the city limits along the Cooum. However, about 1,000 encroachments still remain owing to court cases.
Tender is set to be floated soon to fix a consultant for the work. Once the survey is completed, the process to measure river boundaries for the projects will be accelerated. At present, the Water Resources and the Revenue departments are jointly carrying out this work.
The DGPS will help in geofencing, which in turn allows virtual fencing using GPS coordinates and monitor the changes. Artificial intelligence and satellite imaging will be used to identify changes in land use patterns. A similar effort would be initiated as part of preparing a detailed project report for eco-restoration of the Buckigham Canal, the officials said.
The department is developing Tamil Nadu Land Use Intelligence System, a mobile application, to protect waterbodies from encroachments and monitor reservoir operations, the officials added.
