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Assessing and monitoring the human influence on water quality in response to land transformation within Wular environs of Kashmir Valley

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Abstract

Wular Lake is the largest freshwater lake of India located in north western Himalayas of Kashmir Valley which has got deteriorated over the period of time due to the enough human interference within its catchment areas. The purpose of the present research study is to identify the changes in land use and land cover in the Wular catchment as well as its transformation into other classes and its impact on the overall water quality of the lake. For the present study Landsat (TM) image of 1992 and Landsat-8 (OLI) of 2015 have been used for assessing the changes in land use/land cover. Supervised classification technique was used to generate LULC maps of different categories pertaining to study area for years 1992 and 2015. Regarding water quality, water samples were collected from five different spots of the lake in four different seasons of the year—from December 2014 to September 2015. The sites from which samples were collected are Vintage Park, Ashtungo, Watlab, Makhdomyari and Ningal as site 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively. Some parameters of water like temperature, transparency, depth, conductivity and pH were examined on the spot during the sample collection by their respective measuring instruments. The rest of the parameters were examined in hydrological laboratory within 24 h after collection following the standard methods of APHA (Standard methods for the examination of water and wastewater, 21st edn. American Public Health Association, Washington, DC, 2005). The relationship between the LULC classes and water quality parameters has been calculated with the help of SHDI which has shown both positive and as well as negative results.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are highly thankful to Mr. Manzoor ahmad Bhat, Water Chemist, Public Health Engineering Department, Water Quality Testing Lab Khan Sahib, Budgam, Kashmir for helping us to carry out the physico-chemical analysis of water samples. We would also like to thank Mr. Parvaiz Ahmad Bhat for accompanying us to different places around Wular Lake for collection of water samples during the field survey. Thanks are also due to USGS for providing free Landsat data downloaded via USGS EarthExplorer. We are very thankful to the anonymous reviwers and the editors of GeoJournal for their valuable comments for improving the manuscript.

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No funding was received from any agency for conducting this study.

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  1. Department of Geography, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Jamia Millia Islamia (A Central University), New Delhi, India

    Tariq Ahmad Ganaie, Mehebub Sahana & Haseena Hashia

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  1. Tariq Ahmad Ganaie
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Correspondence to Tariq Ahmad Ganaie.

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Ganaie, T.A., Sahana, M. & Hashia, H. Assessing and monitoring the human influence on water quality in response to land transformation within Wular environs of Kashmir Valley. GeoJournal 83, 1091–1113 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-017-9822-7

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