Water Quality in Inland Water Bodies: Hostage to the Intensification of Anthropogenic Land Uses
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Water Quality in Inland Water Bodies: Hostage to the Intensification of Anthropogenic Land Uses Tarun Teja Kondraju1
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K. S. Rajan1
Received: 21 September 2018 / Accepted: 30 July 2019 Ó Indian Society of Remote Sensing 2019
Abstract Increasing stress due to diminishing freshwater resources around the world has put the world on the brink of extreme water scarcity. Moreover, the declining water quality in the available inland water resources can be attributed to various contaminations of these bodies. In recent decades, nutrient contamination has emerged as a major threat to water quality, and hence, there is need to assess and identify its potential causes. Hence, there is a need to understand the source of these nutrient contaminations in water bodies. This study addresses the extent of such contamination, through Chl-a detection on the water body using Sentinel 2A/B data, and relates it with the land use/land cover in its contributing watershed. It is hypothesized that the intensification of land use patterns—primarily agricultural and urban land uses around the inland water bodies—is potential contributors to this increasing nutrient contamination. To assess this, the paper observes the prevalent land use patterns around four inland water bodies with varied nutrient concentration—from very high to almost negligible values, across South and Southeast Asia. The study concludes that water bodies surrounded by natural land uses are almost free of contamination in comparison with those surrounded by anthropogenic land uses. It also highlights that with increased runoff from anthropogenic land uses, there is an increase in nutrient flow, thereby exponentially causing a drop in water quality in proportion to the size of the water body. Keywords Land use pattern Chl-a Inland water bodies Sentinel 2A/2B
Introduction The ever-increasing demand for clean and clear water with shrinking water resources throughout the world has made water-related contamination an extremely serious issue (WWAP 2014; UN-Water 2016). Water contamination is an enormous area spreading from naturally occurring sediment contamination to human-induced highly rare but extremely potent nuclear contaminations (Sullivan et al. 2005; Zeliger 2008; Schweitzer and Noblet 2018). Currently, one of the most important and widespread water contaminations in the inland water bodies across the world is nutrient contamination (Smith and Schindler 2009). & Tarun Teja Kondraju [email protected] K. S. Rajan [email protected] 1
IIIT-Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, Telangana 500032, India
Nutrient content in the water body will help in the growth of algal population. But, high nutrient concentrations in water bodies can lead to a condition called as eutrophication where the photosynthetic aquatic algae and phytoplankton use the excess nutrient content and dissolved oxygen in the water body to increase their population rapidly. At this state, the water body loses all its capacity to support the flora and fauna living in it and
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