An integrated method has been adopted to estimate soil loss in a plateau and plateau fringe river basin where soil erosion is significant. The integration of Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation model and geographical Information technology has been used for soil loss estimation. In GIS platform, the overlay of rainfall-runoff erosivity factor, soil erodibility factor, slope length factor, slope steepness factor, cover and management factor, support and conservation practices factor results that the high amount of soil loss (more than 100 t ha-1 year-1) is significantly low and occupies 0.08% of the entire study area. High soil loss in upstream of the basin has a close relation to LS and K factor and drainage density. As a result of soil loss in the upper catchment areas, reservoir capacity has been depleted both in dead and live storage space. It is concluded that soil erosion has a significant impact on plateau fringe areas and the estimation of soil loss is an essential input for the adoption of proper land use planning and development strategies.

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Population growth worldwide leads to an increasing pressure on the land. Recent studies reported that many areas covered by badlands are decreasing because parts of badlands are being levelled and converted into arable land. It is important to monitor these changes for environmental planning. This paper proposes a remote-sensing based detection method which allows mapping of badland dynamics based on seasonal vegetation changes in the lower Chambal valley, India. Supervised classification was applied on three Landsat (Thematic Mapper) images, from 3 different seasons; January (winter), April (summer) and October (post-monsoon). Different band selection methods were applied to get the best classification. Validation was done by ground referencing and a GeoEye-1 satellite image. The image from January performed best with overall accuracy of 87% and 0.69 of kappa. This method opens the possibilities of using semi-automatic classification for the Chambal badlands which is so far mapped with manual interpretations only.

Topography, vegetation, climate, water table, and even the anthropogenic activities all are affected by urban growth through diverse mechanisms. The present study focuses on the implications of urban expansion on geomorphology in the historical city of Gwalior in central India. The expansion of urban area has been quantified by deriving data for four decades (1972–2013) from the Landsat images. The results show that the urban built-up area has increased by 08.48 sq. km during the first eighteen years (1972–1990) which has increased to 16.28 sq. km during the next sixteen years (1990–2006). The built-up area has gone up to 23.19 sq. km in the next seven years (2006–2013). Overall during the last 40 years the growth of the urban built-up is nearly three times of the built-up areas in 1972. The average decadal growth rate of population is 27.28 percent while that of built-up land is 36.29 percent. The construction activities have affected important geomorphic features such pediplain, buried pediplain, residual hills, and denudational hills. It was concluded that, instead of shortsighted urban development, proper measures should be taken in accordance with scientific planning for the urban expansion of the city in the future.