Abstract
The water quality of rivers is deteriorating due to human interference. It is essential to understand the relationship between human activities and land use types to assess the water quality of a region. GIS is the latest tool for analyzing this spatial correlation. Land use land cover, and change detection are the best illustration for showing the human interactions with land features. This study assessed water quality index of the upper Ganges River near Haridwar, Uttarakhand, and spatially correlated it with changing land use to reach a logical conclusion. In the upper course of Ganges, along a 78-km stretch from Kaudiyala to Bhogpur, water samples were collected from five stations. For water quality index, physicochemical parameters like pH, EC, DO, TDS, CaCO3−, CaCO3, Cl−, Ca2+, Mg2+, Na+, K+, F−, Fe2+ were considered. The results of the spatial analysis were evaluated through error estimation and spatial correlation. The root mean square error between spatial land use and water quality index at the selected sampling sites was estimated to be 0.1443. The spatial correlation between land use change and site-wise differences in water quality index also showed a high positive correlation, with R2 = 0.8455. The degree of positive correlation and root mean square error strongly indicated that the water quality of the river in the upper course of the Ganges is highly impacted by human activities.
Highlights
Rivers are a natural gift that is highly vulnerable to land use change and anthropogenic activities
Water sample collection sites were chosen along the upper Ganges river to assess the water quality index, while simultaneously, the changes in land use in that portion were determined in order to find a correlation between the human role in changing land features and the deterioration in the water quality
A complex presumption was taken into consideration that the changing land use phenomena due to human intervention may responsible for deteriorating the quality of the water in the upper course of the river Ganges
Summary
Rivers are a natural gift that is highly vulnerable to land use change and anthropogenic activities. Civilization and economic activities evolved around the Ganges, and with the recent growth of industrialization, the whole river system has been impacted by various human activities like bathing, washing clothes, the bathing of animals, transmission of agricultural sewage, and dumping of various harmful wastes [6,7,8,9,10,11]. This situation was limited to the middle and lower course of the Ganges, but recently, many live stations in the upper course have been declared as unfit for drinking or other human uses. Unwanted and waste materials from different sources can cause both surface water and groundwater pollution [18]
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