Cargando…

Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

Land development without thoughtful water supply planning can lead to unsustainability. In practice, management of our lands and waters is often unintegrated. We present new land-use, ecological stream health, water quality, and streamflow data from nine perennial watersheds in the Kathmandu Valley,...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Davids, Jeffrey C., Rutten, Martine M., Shah, Ram Devi T., Shah, Deep N., Devkota, Nischal, Izeboud, Petra, Pandey, Anusha, van de Giesen, Nick
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer International Publishing 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5913389/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29687287
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10661-018-6687-2
_version_ 1783316534869884928
author Davids, Jeffrey C.
Rutten, Martine M.
Shah, Ram Devi T.
Shah, Deep N.
Devkota, Nischal
Izeboud, Petra
Pandey, Anusha
van de Giesen, Nick
author_facet Davids, Jeffrey C.
Rutten, Martine M.
Shah, Ram Devi T.
Shah, Deep N.
Devkota, Nischal
Izeboud, Petra
Pandey, Anusha
van de Giesen, Nick
author_sort Davids, Jeffrey C.
collection PubMed
description Land development without thoughtful water supply planning can lead to unsustainability. In practice, management of our lands and waters is often unintegrated. We present new land-use, ecological stream health, water quality, and streamflow data from nine perennial watersheds in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, in the 2016 monsoon (i.e., August and September) and 2017 pre-monsoon (i.e., April and May) periods. Our goal was to improve understanding of the longitudinal linkages between land-use and water. At a total of 38 locations, the Rapid Stream Assessment (RSA) protocol was used to characterize stream ecology, basic water quality parameters were collected with a handheld WTW multi-parameter meter, and stream flow was measured with a SonTek FlowTracker Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter. A pixel-based supervised classification method was used to create a 30-m gridded land use coverage from a Landsat 8 image scene captured in the fall of 2015. Our results indicated that land-use had a statistically significant impact on water quality, with built land-uses (high and low) having the greatest influence. Upstream locations of six of the nine watersheds investigated had near natural status (i.e., river quality class (RQC) 1) and water could be used for all purposes (after standard treatments as required). However, downstream RSA measurements for all nine watersheds had RQC 5 (i.e., most highly impaired). Generally, water quality deteriorated from monsoon 2016 to pre-monsoon 2017. Our findings reinforce the importance of integrated land and water management and highlight the urgency of addressing waste management issues in the Kathmandu Valley. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10661-018-6687-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-5913389
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2018
publisher Springer International Publishing
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-59133892018-04-30 Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal Davids, Jeffrey C. Rutten, Martine M. Shah, Ram Devi T. Shah, Deep N. Devkota, Nischal Izeboud, Petra Pandey, Anusha van de Giesen, Nick Environ Monit Assess Article Land development without thoughtful water supply planning can lead to unsustainability. In practice, management of our lands and waters is often unintegrated. We present new land-use, ecological stream health, water quality, and streamflow data from nine perennial watersheds in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, in the 2016 monsoon (i.e., August and September) and 2017 pre-monsoon (i.e., April and May) periods. Our goal was to improve understanding of the longitudinal linkages between land-use and water. At a total of 38 locations, the Rapid Stream Assessment (RSA) protocol was used to characterize stream ecology, basic water quality parameters were collected with a handheld WTW multi-parameter meter, and stream flow was measured with a SonTek FlowTracker Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter. A pixel-based supervised classification method was used to create a 30-m gridded land use coverage from a Landsat 8 image scene captured in the fall of 2015. Our results indicated that land-use had a statistically significant impact on water quality, with built land-uses (high and low) having the greatest influence. Upstream locations of six of the nine watersheds investigated had near natural status (i.e., river quality class (RQC) 1) and water could be used for all purposes (after standard treatments as required). However, downstream RSA measurements for all nine watersheds had RQC 5 (i.e., most highly impaired). Generally, water quality deteriorated from monsoon 2016 to pre-monsoon 2017. Our findings reinforce the importance of integrated land and water management and highlight the urgency of addressing waste management issues in the Kathmandu Valley. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10661-018-6687-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer International Publishing 2018-04-23 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC5913389/ /pubmed/29687287 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10661-018-6687-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Davids, Jeffrey C.
Rutten, Martine M.
Shah, Ram Devi T.
Shah, Deep N.
Devkota, Nischal
Izeboud, Petra
Pandey, Anusha
van de Giesen, Nick
Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
title Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
title_full Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
title_fullStr Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
title_full_unstemmed Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
title_short Quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
title_sort quantifying the connections—linkages between land-use and water in the kathmandu valley, nepal
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5913389/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29687287
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10661-018-6687-2
work_keys_str_mv AT davidsjeffreyc quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT ruttenmartinem quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT shahramdevit quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT shahdeepn quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT devkotanischal quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT izeboudpetra quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT pandeyanusha quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal
AT vandegiesennick quantifyingtheconnectionslinkagesbetweenlanduseandwaterinthekathmanduvalleynepal