Impact of land-use patterns on water quality characteristics of Rambiarrah stream in Kashmir Himalaya

ABSTRACT

Water quality characterization of Himalayan streams that provide variety of ecosystem services including drinking water to zooming population is indispensable. In this background, water quality characterization of the Rambiarrah watershed was carried out from Autumn 2016 to Summer 2018, which revealed that all the drinking water quality parameters were within the prescribed limits of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Beauru of Indian Standards (BIS) except total coliform (TC) and fecal coliform (FC). Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) displayed 3 clusters, cluster I, II, III with least, moderate and high anthropogenic disturbance respectively. Principal component analysis (PCA) recognized 4 principal components (PCs) and explained a cumulative variance of 70.3%. Redundancy analysis (RDA) highlighted that agriculture, built-up, and plantation land-use classes explained 55% of the variance, while as 57% of the variance was highlighted by observable sensory features (waste disposal, sewage inflow and mineral extraction). The water quality index (WQI) varied from excellent to very poor water quality category. Physico-chemical parameters like pH, EC, TDS, TH, Ca²⁺, and Mg²⁺ decipher significant effective weights at upstream sites while as microbial load (TC and FC) highlighted significant effective weights at mid and downstream sites. The spatial–temporal pattern of water quality and aquascape landscape interrelationship identified in this study will contribute to the water quality management endeavor.

KEYWORDS:

• Water quality
• Himalayan stream
• aquascape
• total coliform
• water quality index

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on the manuscript. This research was financially supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), India, under the Extra Mural Research (EMR) Funding Scheme (Individual Centric) under grant number: EMR/2016/000324. The authors are indebted to the Department of Environmental science, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, for providing laboratory facilities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Science and Engineering Research Board [grant number EMR/2016/000324].