Effects of urbanization on river basin ecosystem - A framework

Sub-tropical river basins are one of the complex ecosystems and are said to be self-sustaining if left undisturbed. But due to rapid urbanization, unplanned infrastructure developments and over exploitation of the natural resources, these river basins are under extreme pressure especially in terms of water resources. Altered hydrology is a characteristic of urbanized river basins. Therefore, for sustainable river basin ecosystem management, the inadequate knowledge about the factors influencing the river basin ecosystems is one of the major problems. Some conventional methods used for such studies include analysis of the data collected from gauge stations, surveying and sampling method which ultimately leads to the development of statistical models. These models are able to establish the correlations between some factors but they are not functionally viable. For effective river basin ecosystem management, a model is required by the planners to understand the hidden correlations between the factors affecting the urban river basin ecosystem. This paper describes a framework model to study the effects of urbanization on river basin ecosystem using geospatial technologies. To perform the study at regional scale, an attempt has been made to integrate the geospatial data with hydrological, meteorological and environmental data. The results will help to understand the effect of spatio-temporal land use land cover change dynamics on the ecosystem of a rapidly urbanizing sub-tropical watershed.