Eco-Environmental Vulnerability Zonation in Essence of Environmental Monitoring and Management

Abstract

Abstract. The concern of present-day conservation of eco-environment and its approach is to diminish the vulnerability, which demands focus region identification and protection. The identification of the focus region needs greater expertise and management. However, assessment of eco-environmental vulnerability requires numerous variables. The variables are categorised under four extensive aspects namely, hydro-meteorology, land resources, topography and socio-economic factors. The Pombar watershed enfolds three main urbanised cities Bargur, Thirupattur and Uthangarai connected by state-highway (SH-179A) and most of the settlements are situated near foothill regions. Thus, the cultural features persisting in the watershed are subjected to eco-environment vulnerable conditions. Therefore, extraction of variables is carried out using Landsat 8 OLI, Sentinel-2B, ALOS PALSAR DEM and IMD rainguage data respectively. The generated parameters affecting the environment are weighed and ranked through the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) with Geospatial technology for eco-environment vulnerability assessment. Then vulnerability level is categorised into five classes like very high, high, moderate, low and very low with an area of 10%, 12%, 37%, 23%, and 18% respectively. The very high and high classes are distributed in low lying plain regions, where there is high anthropogenic activities, urbanisation and industrialisation, a moderate vulnerable class is more in plateau region due to deforestation and over exploitation. However, very low and low classes are sparsely distributed in higher altitude. The integration of Geospatial technology with AHP makes a powerful tool to assess the eco-environment vulnerability and therefore, three focus regions are demarcated to devote a massive concern on protection and management in the essence of sustainable development.

Monitoring of Multi-Aspect Drought Severity and Socio-Economic Status in the Semi-Arid Regions of Eastern Tamil Nadu, India

“…It detects the effect of thermal stress on vegetative growth and intensity of dryness. The thermal infrared sensor (TIRS) of Landsat 8 OLI was utilized to derive the TCI and the land-surface temperature (LST) was extracted from the thermal band of Landsat 8 using the split-window algorithm [53,54]. TCI was calculated from the minimum and maximum pixel values of LST.…”

Natural And Human-Induced Land Degradation And Its Impact Using Geospatial Approach In The Kallar Watershed Of Tamil Nadu, India

“…It creates forest degradation; the extension of the mentioned processes finally leads to deforestation. The previous studies of Rahaman and Venkatesh (2020), stated that deciduous forest and forest scrub areas are under the degradation stage, which causes environmental degradation in the Nilgiri Biosphere Revere of Western Ghats.…”

“…Globally many organizations and scientific communities have intensively involved and concentrated on land degradation and desertification (UNCCD, IPCC, etc). Numerous independent, academic researchers from around the world are working extensively on monitoring land and environmental degradation (Naseer and Puneeta 2018; Xie 2020; Rahaman and Venkatesh 2020). Those studies were used individually and multi factors were used to assess and monitor land degradation.…”

“…The assessment of land degradation represents a multifaceted process. It is not a single factor outcome; relatively, an integrated property of interacting human and biophysical factors (Svensson 2005;Masoud 2018;Venkatesh et al 2020). These works address the role of human activity in land degradation and their influencing factors such as unplanned landuse practices, over utilisation of agricultural lands, conversion of agricultural land into settlement plots, inappropriate conservation methods, planning, land management, and tourism activities.…”

Investigating Eco-Environmental Vulnerability for China–Pakistan Economic Corridor Key Sector Punjab Using Multi-Sources Geo-Information

“…Research on EVA has remained a growing field of interest among environmental scientists in the past two decades. Numerous studies attempting to investigate the eco-environment conditions and their influencing factors have been conducted in several areas around the globe, such as in China [23][24][25][26][27], Vietnam [28,29], Australia [30], Argentina [31], India [32], Benin [33], and Nepal [34]. Since the eco-environment problems are distinctly distributed in different regions, a uniform model for EVA cannot be constructed.…”