Spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover and land surface temperature in Ganges-Brahmaputra delta: A comparative analysis between India and Bangladesh     

《Applied geography (Sevenoaks, England)》2016

Land use and land cover (LULC) change in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta (GBD) poses significant challenges towards future environmental sustainability of the region and requires regional scale monitoring of key bio-physical variables and changes in their inter-relationship over space and time. Focusing on the southern part of the lower GBD region along the international border of India and Bangladesh, this study examined the spatio-temporal variability of LULC change and its relationship with Land Surface Temperature (LST). Furthermore, LULC-LST relationships were compared between Indian and Bangladesh part and its trend in and around big cities (with more than 1 million population) and towns (with more than 100,000 population) was investigated. Results showed that LST changes were predominantly driven by LULC changes on both sides of the border. Urban growth is the dominant form of LULC change, and the rate of land change was faster in 2005–2010 time period than 1989–2005. Over the period of 21 years, mean January LST decreased by approximately 1.83 °C in Indian part and 1.85 °C in the Bangladesh part. Areas that changed from to rural from agricultural experienced decrease in mean LST, whereas those areas that changed to urban from either agriculture or rural, experienced increase in mean LST. The relationship between LULC and LST are same on both sides of the Indo-Bangladesh border. In bigger cities like Kolkata (in India) and Khulna (in Bangladesh), there is a high spatial variability in relationship between LULC and LST compared to large towns. The LULC-LST relationship in large towns in India was influenced by proximity to Kolkata and coastal areas, whereas in Bangladesh no such influence was evident. The results and the data produced in this study are crucial for monitoring LULC changes, for developing spatial decision support system, and thus will be helpful to address the current challenges of land management in the GBD region. Changes in the LULC and LST are important indicators of GBD's environmental health and access its vulnerability and thus the present findings serve as baseline information for future studies seeking to examine the impact of differential policies on the LULC change in the region.  相似文献   

Bringing globalization to the countryside: Special Economic Zones in India          下载免费PDF全文

Mohammad Amir Anwar  Pádraig Carmody 《Singapore journal of tropical geography》2016,37(2):121-138

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are important vectors of neoliberal globalization in India. Despite facing widespread resistance against the proposed land acquisition for these zones, they are still being promoted across the country. We argue that the wealth redistribution to the country's elites and the fractured resistance movements enable neoliberalism and its practices to grow in the countryside. Using a private sector SEZ in Gurgaon as a case study, this article explores how special economic zoning, as a neoliberal policy, has been implicated in the spatialized production of poverty. We also show that the main actors who promote neoliberalism in India (the state and the large‐scale urban private sector) have found a seemingly unlikely ally in rural India in the form of farmers with large landholdings, rural elites who are willing to let go of their land under certain conditions. The data for the article was collected in India in 2009–10.  相似文献   

Conservation-induced resettlement as a driver of land cover change in India: An object-based trend analysis     

《Applied geography (Sevenoaks, England)》2016

Located in the foothills of the Indian Himalaya, Rajaji National Park was established to protect and enhance the habitat of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and tiger (Panthera tigris). In 2002 the Van Gujjars, indigenous forest pastoralists, were voluntarily resettled from the Chilla Range (an administrative unit of Rajaji National Park) to Gaindikhata, a nearby area where they were granted land for agriculture. In this study we used a variety of remote sensing approaches to identify changes in land cover associated with the resettlement. The methods comprise two main approaches. First, we used object-based image analysis (OBIA) to identify the pre-resettlement land cover classes of use areas (representing agricultural expansion and adjacent areas of grazing, and collection of fuelwood and fodder) and recovery areas (representing areas where settlements were removed, and the adjacent areas of resource use). Secondly, we used trend analysis to assess the gradual and abrupt changes in vegetation that took place in use and recovery areas. To conduct the trend analysis we used BFAST (Breaks For Additive Season and Trend), which separates seasonal variation from long-term trends, and identifies breaks that can be linked back to disturbances or land cover changes. We found that the OBIA classification yielded high average class accuracies, and we were able to make class distinctions that would have been difficult to make using a traditional pixel-based approach. Pre-resettlement, the recovery areas were classified as mixed forest and riparian vegetation. In contrast, the use areas were classified primarily as grass dominated, brush dominated, and plantation forest, and were located relatively far away from riparian areas. Following the resettlement, the trend analysis showed a sudden change in the seasonal variation of NDVI in areas converted to agriculture. Areas neighboring the new agricultural land experienced sudden decreases in NDVI, suggestive of disturbances, at a higher rate than the same land cover types elsewhere. At the same time, these neighboring areas experienced a gradual overall increase in NDVI which could be caused by an expansion of leafy invasive shrubs such as Lantana camara in areas heavily used for biomass collection. The recovery areas also experienced a gradual increase in NDVI as well as sudden breaks to this trend, but we lacked evidence to connect these changes to the resettlement. Our findings support the claim that the resettlement has shifted pressure from more ecologically valuable to less ecologically valuable land cover types, and suggest that to some degree resource use pressure has increased outside the park. The study employs a novel synthesis of OBIA and trend analysis that could be applied to land change studies more broadly.  相似文献   

Upscaling of transmissivity,derived from specific capacity: a hydrogeomorphological approach applied to the Doon Valley aquifer system in India     

S. K. Srivastav  M. W. Lubczynski  A. K. Biyani 《Hydrogeology Journal》2007,15(7):1251-1264

Transmissivity (T) is one of the most important parameters in groundwater studies, and is generally estimated from pumping tests. T can also be deduced from abundantly available specific-capacity (Q/s) data by using analytical and/or empirical approaches, further upscaled by geostatistical methods. A different, remote sensing based, hydrogeomorphological approach is proposed, to upscale T from point- or well-scale to aquifer-scale, and it is applied to the piedmont alluvial aquifer system of Doon Valley in India. In the first step, Q/s and T data-pairs available from aquifer tests were used to establish an empirical, logarithmic relation. Subsequently, satellite imagery along with available data from published and unpublished maps, literature sources and ground surveys were used to divide the aquifer system into major hydrogeomorphological domains that control the groundwater occurrence and flow. Then, the T data derived from Q/s (using the empirical relation) and that available from pumping tests at well-scale were upscaled to aquifer-scale by averaging the T values within each hydrogeomorphological domain. Such a stratification approach is especially useful in areas where availability of only a few data-pairs of known Q/s and T limit the use of geostatistical techniques. A comparative study of the published empirical relations between Q/s and T in various hydrogeologic settings revealed that the relation obtained for Doon Valley aquifer system is close to that found for a similar alluvial aquifer system in Morocco.  相似文献   

Source speciation resolving hydrochemical complexity of coastal aquifers     

《Marine pollution bulletin》2014,78(1-2):118-129

There is a growing concern of seawater intrusion to freshwater aquifers due to groundwater overexploitation in the eastern coastal belt of Southern India. The problem becomes complex in the regions where industrial effluents are also contaminating the freshwater aquifers. In order to understand the hydrochemical complexity of the system, topographic elevation, static water level measurements, major ion chemistry, ionic cross plots, water type contours and factor analysis were applied for 144 groundwater samples of shallow and deep sources from Quaternary and Tertiary coastal aquifers, located within the industrial zone of 25 km² area near Cuddalore, Southern India. The ionic cross plots indicates dissolution of halite minerals from marine sources and seawater mixing into inland aquifers up to the level of 9.3%. The factor analysis explains three significant factors totaling 86.3% of cumulative sample variance which includes varying contribution from marine, industrial effluent and freshwater sources.  相似文献   

Environmental flows in India: towards sustainable water management     

Sharad K. Jain  Pradeep Kumar 《水文科学杂志》2014,59(3-4):751-769

Abstract

The strong wet and dry seasons of tropical monsoon hydrology in India necessitate development of storage and flow diversion schemes for utilization of water to meet various social and economic needs. However, the river valley schemes may cause adverse flow-related impacts due to storage, flow diversion, tunnelling and spoil disposal. There may be critical reaches in which altered flows are not able to sustain the river channel ecology and riparian environment that existed prior to implementation of the storage and diversion schemes. In the past, environmental flows in India have usually been understood as the minimum flow to be released downstream from a dam as compensation for riparian rights, without considering the impacts on the river ecosystem. Rivers in India have been significantly influenced by anthropogenic activities over the past 60 years and have great social and religious significance to the vast population. This paper explores various aspects of past, present and future environmental flow assessment (EFA) in India highlighted by case studies from rivers across the nation. It demonstrates that multidisciplinary studies requiring expertise from a range of fields are needed for EFA, and that environmental flows are necessary for aquatic ecosystems to remain in a healthy state and for the sustainable use of water resources. The major focus areas for the development of EFA research in India are the creation of a shareable database for hydrological, ecological and socioeconomic data, developing hydrology–ecology relationships, evaluation of ecosystem services, addressing pollution due to anthropogenic activities and promotion of research on EFA. At the same time, efforts will be needed to develop new methods or refine existing methods for India.