Ramachandra, TV and Shivamurthy, V and Subramanian, AK and Varghese, S and Setturu, B and Aithal, BH (2022) Appraisal of Environmental Health and Ecohydrology of Free-Flowing Aghanashini River, Karnataka, India. In: Water (Switzerland), 14 (6).
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Abstract
Rivers are vital freshwater resources that cater to the needs of society. The burgeoning population and the consequent land-use changes have altered the hydrologic regime with biophysical and chemical integrity changes. This necessitates understanding the land-use dynamics, flow dy-namics, hydrologic regime, and water quality of riverine ecosystems. An assessment of the land-use dynamics in the Aghanashini River basin reveals a decline in vegetation cover from 86.06 (1973) to 50.78 (2018). The computation of eco-hydrological indices (EHI) highlights that the sub-watersheds with native vegetation had higher infiltration (and storage) than water loss due to evapotranspiration and meeting the societal demand. The computation of water quality index helped to assess the overall water quality across seasons. The study provides insights into hydrology linkages with the catchment landscape dynamics to the hydrologists and land-use managers. These insights would aid in the prudent management of river basins to address water stress issues through watershed treatment involving afforestation with native species, appropriate cropping, and soil conservation measures. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Water (Switzerland) |
| Publisher: | MDPI |
| Additional Information: | The copyright for this article belongs to authors. |
| Keywords: | Catchments; Dynamics; Land use; Multivariant analysis; Reforestation; Rivers; Soil conservation; Vegetation; Watersheds, Eco-hydrological index; Eco-hydrology; Environmental health; Flow regimes; Hydrologic regime; Land use dynamics; Multi variate analysis; River basins; Water quality index; Water quality indexes, Water quality, afforestation; ecohydrology; evapotranspiration; freshwater environment; infiltration; landscape ecology; soil conservation; water quality; water stress; watershed, India |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences > Center for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP) Division of Mechanical Sciences > Centre for Sustainable Technologies (formerly ASTRA) |
| Date Deposited: | 18 May 2022 05:02 |
| Last Modified: | 18 May 2022 05:02 |
| URI: | https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/71797 |
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