The Thai Nguyen Provincial Special-Use and Protective Forest Management Board is responsible for managing, protecting, constructing, using and developing more than 19,000 hectares of special-use forests in 7 communes and 1 town of Vo Nhai district. At the same time, it manages more than 3,400 hectares of protective forests in 6 communes of the province.

Over the past year, the Board has promoted the application of the patrol data and reporting toolkit (SMART). This has brought about very practical results in the management and protection of special-use forests and protective forests.

Officers of the Management Board of Special-use and Protective Forests of Thai Nguyen province conduct field inspection.

Officers of the Management Board of Special-use and Protective Forests of Thai Nguyen province conduct field inspection.

SMART is a data management and patrol reporting toolkit officially applied at the national level by many countries around the world to support management and protection work in protected areas.

SMART helps standardize data collection, analysis, and reporting on the status of natural resource management and biodiversity in protected area systems. This data is very helpful in the process of developing regulations and making appropriate decisions for more effective management and conservation.

In Vietnam, since 2022, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has issued a procedure for using the patrol data management and reporting toolkit (SMART) in special-use and protection forests.

Accordingly, this application is unified for common use nationwide. On that basis, the Provincial Management Board of Special-Use and Protective Forests has promoted the application of information technology in forest protection management using specialized software through the application of SMART, with the upgraded version SMART6.3.0.

With full basic information fields to best serve forest management activities, the SMART application is simple to access and easy to use.

Not only is it suitable for local rangers, forest rangers and community forest protection patrol groups to record field information during field patrols, the application is also unified to use the Vietnamese version. Therefore, the application circulation is quite convenient.

Mr. Duong Son Ha, Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, noted: After just over 1 year of getting acquainted, the staff of the Provincial Special-Use and Protective Forest Management Board have used the SMART application very proficiently.

Previously, the collection of patrol data by rangers was done through handheld GPS devices; paper forms and forms; cameras and manually entered into computers, which was time-consuming and risky.

Since using the SMART application, collecting information and field data has become easier, faster and more accurate. Specifically, the specialized forest protection force, when starting to patrol and inspect forest protection, uses the SMART Mobile tool to enter patrol information and update information during the patrol.

When finished, the forest protection force finishes the patrol route, exports the patrol data and sends it to the server via Zalo or gmail for synthesis, and periodically reports monthly in the meeting.

At the same time, automatically export reports to unit leaders to evaluate the level of work completion, orient work content in the coming time...

Thanks to the effective support of the SMART application, the Board's leaders always have timely guidance to improve and enhance the quality and efficiency of professional work of staff.

The application of SMART is very necessary, helping to improve the effectiveness of law enforcement. In particular, it contributes to the effective implementation of forest protection management tasks, monitoring and supervising biodiversity, helping the specialized forest protection force of the unit to improve the effectiveness in performing assigned tasks. Mr. Le Cam Long, Head of Thai Nguyen Provincial Forest Protection Department

According to Tung Lam (Thai Nguyen Newspaper)