No abstract

Whether a settlement may urban or rural it performs different roles as commercial, administrative centre for surrounding regions. Settlements act as central places representing a particular tier of the settlement hierarchy. The roles of planned small townships on regional development and the interactions between those settlements and the periphery have been studied by many geographers in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These centers are at the lower order of urban hierarchy, and they have been planned purposefully in many countries based on Urban Functions for Rural Development Approach (UFRD) to accelerate the development of backward areas. Since these centers trickle down innovation & modernization to rural neighborhoods the roles of these centers are diverse. In order to achieve fruitful results of settlement planning most effective and rational spatial and location planning strategy is essential to promote these small centers within well-articulated, integrated and balanced urban hierarchy. Based on this perspective main objective of the study was evaluating the multiple roles of planned small townships in North Central Province (NCP) for the development of their neighborhoods. Thus, Thambuttegama was selected as the study area. Demarcating the sphere of influence of selected functions and assess the existing functional structure of the township were among other specific objectives. The primary data on commercial and non-governmental functions of the township was collected through a structured questionnaire, field survey and through informal interviews. Secondary data and other related information were gathered from official statistics, other published materials, unpublished reports and internal records. Variations of the linkages and urban functions in spatial and temporal dimensions have been shown as maps, spider graphs using GIS based tools such as overlay, buffering through the study.

Water quality can be identified as the main agent of human health. Different approaches and techniques can be used to analyze groundwater quality. Among them, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is one of the approaches that can be utilized to analyze water quality levels in a spatial context and it provides more powerful tools that can be interpreted the spatial variation of the water quality parameters over the geographical space. Accordingly, the study was conducted to analyze spatial variations of the water quality in drinking wells in the Buttala Divisional Secretariat (DSD) which is an agricultural area in the dry zone. The methodological procedure is extremely important in this type of research thus, the spatial Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) procedure was used. Multi-criteria analysis has been widely applied to solve decision-making problems related to the environment, and natural resource management. In the study, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and MCDA integrated approach were used to visualize the spatial patterns of the water quality in the study area and to formulate the water quality index map. To generate the water quality index map, pH value, turbidity, electrical conductivity (EC), florid, and nitrate of 48 water samples were collected from the domestic well and tube wells from 10 Grama Niladari Divisions (GND) in Buttala DS. The ArcGIS 10.3 software was used for spatial analysis like Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and kriging. The results revealed that 11.2% of the water of the drinking wells in the study area has a good fitness level, while 68.7% of wells show a moderate quality level. Out of the total samples is shown that 18.5% of wells had a poor-quality level, and 1.2% was found to be very poor for drinking purposes. And also, 0.4 % of the area is unsuitable for drinking. The study shows that geospatial techniques are more effective for studying the water quality in any area in an accurate decision support tool.