Streamflow-based watershed resilience assessment in a tropical savannah region of India

Lingaraj Dhal () and Mitthan Lal Kansal
Additional contact information
Lingaraj Dhal: Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Mitthan Lal Kansal: Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2024, vol. 26, issue 2, No 58, 4245-4267

Abstract: Abstract Watersheds are vital dynamic natural systems with varying climatic, hydro-geologic and land-use and land-cover conditions. Hence, the resilience assessment of watersheds is a cumbersome task and imperative for natural resources managers. The study of watershed resilience necessitates a large amount of data, time and process-based modelling approaches. To address this problem, the study put forward a framework for the watershed resilience assessment based on the changes and the signal given by the watershed during the transition from one state to another. Streamflow is considered the key parameter for the assessment of watershed resilience, which is the response of watersheds to hydro-climatic conditions and anthropogenic activities inside the watershed boundary. The proposed framework is demonstrated with the help of watersheds of the Budhabalanga River basin in the Odisha state of India. The study revealed that the flow of the Budhabalanga River is highly influenced by the hydro-climatic conditions as well as land-use and land-cover, which has varied due to various anthropogenic activities. The upstream area of the river basin is found to be more resilient compared to other parts. Further, the streamflow at the three stations, namely Baripada, Manitri and Govindpur, in the Budhabalanga River basin shows potential for critical transition or even possible drift towards a lower resilience condition after 2013. The study illustrates the usefulness of the framework to study watershed resilience where time and availability of data are key issues for studying the resilience of watershed systems through an integrated hydro-climatological and ecosystem model.

Keywords: Watershed resilience; Streamflow; Critical slowing down; Resilience indicator (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-022-02882-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:26:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s10668-022-02882-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-022-02882-7

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().