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Modelling the effects of long-term urban land use change on the water balance
143-159Views:63The level of land consumption for housing and transport contrasts sharply with both the necessity and the legal obligation to maintain the ecological potential afforded by open spaces to meet the needs of current and future generations in terms of resource protection and climate change. Owing to the increasing intensity of soil usage, in many urban landscapes the soil conditions has deteriorated. The natural filter and run-off regulating functions of soils are impaired or even disappeared altogether by land surfacing. Since such soil functions closely depend on the soil’s biophysical properties, the decline of water balance functionality caused by urbanisation and increasing imperviousness varies. In response to the demand to sustainably secure urban water resources, it needs to be assessed exactly how land surfacing affects the functions concerned. Analysing and evaluating the urban land use change and the respective imperviousness on the long-term water balance ought to improve our general understanding of the water household related impact of urbanisation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to assess the impact of urban land use change and land surfacing on the long-term water balance over a 130-year trajectory using the example of Leipzig. In particular, attention is to be paid to evapotranspiration, direct runoff and groundwater recharge.
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Rainfall Dependency and Water quality Assessment of springs of three villages of Rudraprayag District: An analysis of veins of Uttarakhand Himalaya
36-47Views:90A spring is a crevice in the substrate that forms naturally and allows water to pour out directly from the earths subsurface. Every major river in the country has a system of springs that serve as a symbolic representation of its source. But this very fundamental source of many resources is in peril. The problem is mainly related with the reduced discharge rate of water from the spring. The reason of truncate discharge rate is variability in the rainfall pattern in the recharge area due to the climate change over the years.To ensure the quality and security of the public's water supply, regular quality assessments of drinking water sources are required. In consequence, this study not only analyse the rainfall dependency of springs but also evaluated the spring water quality for drinking, using water quality index, in three villages located in Jakholi block of Rudraparayag district, Uttarakhand. The ten foremost physiochemical elements that regulate water quality—Nitrate, Fluoride, Iron, pH, Turbidity, Chloride, Residual Chlorine, Magnesium, sulphate, and Hardness—were investigated to ensure compliance with guidelines defined by the Bureau of Indian Standards IS: 12500:2012. After examining the data, it became apparent that all of the indicators pointed to acceptable water quality, making it ideal for drinking. However, because of its low discharge and great reliance on rainfall, its position is getting more detrimental.
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Quantitative Morphometric Analysis of Streams in Extreme Humid Areas: A Case Study of the Um-Mawiong River Basin, Mawsynram, Meghalaya
59-75Views:134Quantitative morphometric analysis of the drainage system is essential to characterising a watershed, as all the hydrologic and geomorphic processes occur within the watershed. Consequently, this plays a crucial role in understanding the geo-hydrological attributes of a drainage basin to the terrain feature and its flow patterns, thus enabling the estimate of the incidence of infiltration and runoff and other related hydrological characteristics of a watershed, which strongly impacts natural resource conservation. The study area selected is the Um-Mawiong River basin in Mawsynram, Meghalaya. The basin shows a dendritic pattern that highlights the homogeneity in the texture of the basin. Results suggest that the stream frequency of the basin is 19.10 km², suggesting a faster surface runoff and less infiltration. In addition, it has an Elongation ratio of 0.75 indicating an elongated basin shape. The current study demonstrates that the implementations of GIS techniques are trustworthy, efficient, and capable of managing extensive databases for managing river basins. The present study tries to analyse the linear, areal and relief aspects of the basin using a GIS environment and manipulated for different calculations. The analysis reveals that the total number of stream segments and length are maximum in first-order streams and decrease as stream order increases. The drainage density exhibits a high degree of positive correlation, i.e., 0.87, with its frequency suggesting an increase in stream population concerning increasing drainage density and vice versa.
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The Formation of Social and Economic Peripheries in Hungary after the Change of Regime
179-187Views:183The Hungarian industrial revolution started in the second half of the 19th century, which caused the revaluation of the geographical peripheries in Hungary. After the Trianon Treaty the rural areas of Hungary lost their foreign markets and became the "country of three million beggars". The socialist industrialization of the systems of Rákosi and Kádár absorbed the surplus of rural labour, but the industrialization meant the redistributive exploitation of the agricultural areas and the further impoverishment. After the political transition in 1989, the rural Hungary could not be the "pantry of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance", and the final crisis of the Hungarian agricultural sales finalized the deformation of the three-quarters of Hungary, the major part of the rural areas in Hungary. In the recent decades the brain drain worked in the Hungarian peripheries, the disinvestment and the pauperization increased. The emerging of the new latifundia and the monoculture commodity production operate independently, separated from the Hungarian rural people in the sense of ownerships and production. As the result of these negative processes, significant part of the society in the peripheral areas declassed. In this hopeless situation awareness only a conscious regional policy and above all, a very well-considered education is only able to offer a chance for break.
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Comparison of CO2-emissions of households heated by natural gas and firewood
64-72Views:110In terms of climate protection, one of the most important questions is the reduction of the GHG emission. In this study, I compared CO2 -emission of households heated by natural gas and firewood, which had similar heated area and volume of air, considering the carbon-dioxide absorbing of forests of the households heated by firewood. Natural gas is a fossil fuel; however, the firewood (solid biomass) is a renewable energy resource. One of the main features of renewable energy sources is to get into the atmosphere less CO2 than fossil fuels. The renewable energy resources emit into the air just as much CO2 as they absorb during their life cycle.