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Assessment of land use land cover change impact on hydrological regime of a basin

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Abstract

The sustainability of water resources mainly depends on planning and management of land use; a small change in it may affect water yield largely, as both are linked through relevant hydrological processes, explicitly. However, human activities, especially a significant increase in population, in-migration and accelerated socio-economic activities, are constantly modifying the land use and land cover (LULC) pattern. The impact of such changes in LULC on the hydrological regime of a basin is of widespread concern and a great challenge to the water resource engineers. While studying these impacts, the issue that prevails is the selection of a hydrological model that may be able to accommodate spatial and temporal dynamics of the basin with higher accuracy. Therefore, in the present study, the capabilities of variable infiltration capacity hydrological model to hydrologically simulate the basin under varying LULC scenarios have been investigated. For the present analysis, the Pennar River Basin, Andhra Pradesh, which falls under a water scarce region in India, has been chosen. The water balance components such as runoff potential, evapotranspiration (ET) and baseflow of Pennar Basin have been simulated under different LULC scenarios to study the impact of change on hydrological regime of a basin. Majorly, increase in built-up (13.94% approx.) and decrease in deciduous forest cover (2.44%) are the significant changes observed in the basin during the last three decades. It was found that the impact of LULC change on hydrology is balancing out at basin scale (considering the entire basin, while routing the runoff at the basin outlet). Therefore, an analysis on spatial variation in each of the water balance components considered in the study was done at grid scale. It was observed that the impact of LULC is considerable spatially at grid level, and the maximum increase of 265 mm (1985–2005) and the decrease of 48 mm (1985–1995) in runoff generation at grid were estimated. On the contrary, ET component showed the maximum increase of 400 and decrease of 570 mm under different LULC change scenario. Similarly, in the base flow parameter, an increase of 70 mm and the decrease of 100 mm were observed. It was noticed that the upper basin is showing an increasing trend in almost all hydrological components as compared to the lower basin. Based on this basin scale study, it was concluded that change in the land cover alters the hydrology; however, it needs to be studied at finer spatial scale rather than the entire basin as a whole. The information like the spatial variation in hydrological components may be very useful for local authority and decision-makers to plan mitigation strategies accordingly.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the authorities of Indian Space Research Organisation for providing financial grant for this research work. The work has been done under the ISRO-GBP Project on “Land Use Land Cover dynamics and impact of Human Dimension in Indian river basins”. The authors thank IMD for providing daily gridded data on rainfall and temperature and the VIC hydrological model team for their help during the course of the study. Thanks are due to LULC team for their efforts in generating LULC map for entire India and for providing the data for this particular basin. Authors would like to extend their gratitude to Ms. Asfa Siddiqui for reviewing the manuscript and correcting it for the language.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Water Resources Department, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Indian Space Research Organisation, Department of Space, Government of India, 4, Kalidas Road, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, 248 001, India

    Vaibhav Garg, S. P. Aggarwal, Bhaskar R. Nikam & Praveen K. Thakur

  2. Geo-informatics Department, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Indian Space Research Organisation, Department of Space, Government of India, 4, Kalidas Road, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, 248 001, India

    Prasun K. Gupta

  3. Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Indian Space Research Organisation, Department of Space, Government of India, 4, Kalidas Road, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, 248 001, India

    S. K. Srivastav & A. Senthil Kumar

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  1. Vaibhav Garg
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  2. S. P. Aggarwal
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Garg, V., Aggarwal, S.P., Gupta, P.K. et al. Assessment of land use land cover change impact on hydrological regime of a basin. Environ Earth Sci 76, 635 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-017-6976-z

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