Raihan Ahmed

Nowgong College · Department of Geography

The study explored potential of groundwater in the Lower Barpani watershed of Assam, India. Ten site-specific groundwater factors in the watershed were assigned weights through analytical hierarchy process. The weighted factors were integrated to prepare groundwater potential zones in GIS environment. Results revealed that the northern and northwes...

Dynamic and vigorous top soil is the source for healthy flora, fauna, and humans, and soil organic matters are the underpinning for healthy and productive soils. Organic components in the soil play significant role in stimulating soil productivity processes and vegetation development. This article deals with the scientific demand for estimating soi...

Watershed prioritization based on erosion risk assessment using morphometric parameters can play an important role in sustainable development of natural resources. Hence, watershed prioritization through an efficient technique is prerequisite for the implementation of conservation measures. The present study makes an attempt to identify the critica...

Wetlands play a significant role in maintaining environmental stability. These have a complex of values like food storage, water quality maintenance, livelihood and support species diversity, etc. Wetlands inventory is the pre-requisite process for conservation and management practices. The study makes an attempt to delineate wetlands and prepare i...

Land suitability evaluation is prerequisite for assessing the limitations for sustainable land use planning. We used ten site specific criteria (rainfall, texture, drainage, soil depth, slope, distance to major road, distance to nearest sugar mill, erosion hazard, risk of flooding and pH) and applied weighted multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) techniq...

Flood is always a source of social lamentation, huge infrastructural losses and disruption to economic activities in Bhagirathi Sub-basin in India. Climate variability and increasing flood incidents have created a dilemma for social, economic and environmental conditions of the affected communities. These implications necessitate assessing overall...

The Brahmaputra River, in its middle reaches, has eroded many pockets of land, eventually leading to drastic bank-line shifting. This study aims to analyze the bank-line migration of the Brahmaputra in the Middle Brahmaputra floodplains of Assam, India, over a period of 30 years (1990–2020) and forecast their positioning using Digital Shoreline Ana...

The process of erosion as an inevitable and disastrous mechanism has caused migration of bank lines of rivers globally. In its middle reaches, the Brahmaputra River has eroded many pockets of land, eventually leading to drastic bank line shifting. This study aims to analyze the bank line migration of the Brahmaputra river in the Middle Brahmaputra...

Anthropogenic activities, climate variability and environmental stresses have greatly affected forest ecosystems globally. Thus, monitoring of forest health is essential for proper planning and effective management. The present study employed an integrated approach of remote sensing and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to assess the forest health i...

Frequency of climate change-induced multi-hazards has increased, making coastal areas at greater risk. Thus, devising the suitable adaptation strategies is essential for reducing the impact of such hazards on local communities. Most of the earlier studies touched upon different aspects of vulnerability to coastal disasters, community-based adaptati...

Sustainability of water resources assumes great concern in view of global climate change. In this study, descriptive, thematic and mechanism analyses of current literature were carried out with the aim of understanding linkages among climate variability, climate change and water resources, bridging knowledge gaps and recommending framework for futu...

Climate variability has increased the frequency of disasters and affected the livelihood of the people to a greater extent. Therefore, livelihood vulnerability assessment assumes greater significance for understanding the interlinkages between climate variability induced disasters and livelihood pattern. In this paper, an attempt has been made to t...

Climate change has caused vulnerability not only to the forest ecosystem but also to forest-dependent communities. Therefore, its management is essential to increase forest ecosystem services and reduce vulnerability to climate change using an integrated approach. Although many scientific studies examined climate change impact on forest ecosystems,...

Climate variability analysis is essential for predicting the behavior of various extreme weather events and making communities resilient. Notwithstanding the profound concerns, climate variability assessment faces numerous challenges due to inadequate and sometimes unavailability of data at spatiotemporal scales. This study makes an attempt to anal...

Coastal districts of India being diverse in nature are under constant vulnerability to hazards. The article analyzes vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity and adaptation capacity. We selected site-specific factors of exposure, sensitivity and adaptation for constructing the composite vulnerability index. Findings revealed very high a...

Drought is a natural phenomenon posing severe implications for soil, groundwater and agricultural yield. It has been recognized as one of the most pervasive global change drivers to affect the soil. Soil being a weakly renewable resource takes a long time to form, but it takes no time to degrade. However, the response of soil to drought conditions...

Climate variability induced changes in rainfall and temperature have degraded the health of vegetation across the world. Thus, monitoring of vegetation condition is essential for maintaining ecosystem health, climate sustainability and biodiversity. This article examines vegetation condition in Nainital district located in Kumaon foothills in India...

Coastal areas are experiencing greater risk because of the increased frequency of multiple climate change-induced hazards. Thus, identification of suitable adaptation strategies for local communities has become imperative for lessening the impact of climate change. Although a large number of studies have touched upon the different components of vul...

Climate variability and continual occurrence of cyclones, flood and storm surge have greater implications on fragile ecosystem of Indian Sundarban Biosphere Reserve (SBR). Centurial meteorological data were used to assess the climate variability in the Reserve. Multivariate principal component analysis was performed to identify the consistency amon...

Sundarban Biosphere Reserve (SBR), an ecologically sensitive and dynamic region, is susceptible to cyclones, floods, storm surge and sea level rise. Multi-hazard events in the Reserve have severely affected the coastal landscape and increased the magnitude of various losses to the communities during the last ten years. Losses such as damage to hous...

Severe drought conditions have affected ever increasing demand of water in Godavari Middle Sub-Basin of India. Thus, assessment of drought and its impact on groundwater potential zones is essential for effective management of water resource in the Sub-basin. We utilized site-specific factors for ascertaining the groundwater potential zones. Analyti...

This book provides an overview of remote sensing and GIScience (GIS) and their challenges and future directions. Modern technology like remote sensing and GIS with timely and accurate information helps to monitor and analyze a wide range of phenomena like water, vegetation, land, and human activities. Inter-disciplinary studies are also noticed in...

Godavari middle sub-basin covering one district of Telangana state and eleven districts of Maharashtra state in India has been experiencing severe drought due to climate variability over the past several decades. Lying in the rain shadow zone of Western Ghats (mountain pass), it receives scant rainfall. Therefore, monitoring and assessing of drough...

The paper explored the level of forest disturbance in the Sariska Tiger Reserve (STR) of Indian tropical forest. We acquired single scene image of Landsat-5 (1989) and Landsat-8 (2015) for the analysis. Disturbance map was produced using fragmentation and canopy density models. The map was categorized into high, moderate, low, and undisturbed fores...

Throughout the tropical regions, raising demands for the land due to the exponential growth of the human population has resulted in habitat loss and fragmentation for wildlife. Consequently, wild animals come out from the fragmented habitats and compete with the human for resources. In order to reduce this conflict, sustainable habitat management b...

This chapter presents a habitat suitability mapping of sloth bear using fuzzy analytical hierarchy process that relies on geographical information system (GIS)–automated techniques. We selected nine parameters for assessing sloth bear habitat suitability: food availability, distance to waterholes, canopy density, slope, elevation, grazing, human di...

The study attempts to prepare an inventory map of landslide susceptibility using geospatial technology and bivariate frequency ratio model for Karbi Anglong West district in Assam, India. Past landslide locations were extracted from the landslide hazard zonation map of Assam for preparing landslide susceptibility. Of the total past landslide locati...

Asiatic elephants are facing numerous direct and indirect anthropogenic threats throughout their geographical distributional range. Consequent to the land use and land cover change, habitat loss, fragmentation, and deterioration of the corridor status are the prime threats for the species. The current study aimed to delineate the routes and migrato...

Diverse anthropogenic pressure has led to land use change in the form of decline of vegetation and fragmented habitats. With rising anthropogenic threats, many species are restricted to fragmented and degraded habitats and declining biodiversity. The aim of the study was to understand the forest health status in Patharia Hills Reserve Forest (RF) u...

The main objective of the study is to assess land suitability for suggesting suitable crop sequences in Katihar district of Bihar, India. We first selected site-specific factors and assigned their weights using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) for land suitability assessment. The layers of factors were integrated to prepare land suitability map....

Rising sea levels and the increasing intensity of storm surges and tropical cyclones due to climate change and the resulting dynamic shifts in shoreline positions have dramatically increased the exposure risk and vulnerability of local communities inhabiting the ecologically sensitive deltaic tracts of the Sunderbans in India. The impacts arising f...

The present study attempts to identify the suitable crop sequences in an agriculturally productive district of Bihar,-pulse-potato and maize-maize-rice were found to be the suitable crop sequences in the area under study. Findings revealed that most of the blocks were found suitable for suggested crop sequences, while only two blocks namely Balramp...

The movement of suspended sediment along the coastal water is an indicator of erosion and deposition of the coastal landforms. The current study deals with the spatio-temporal movement of suspended sediments in the shallow along the southwest coast of Thiruvananthapuram district, Kerala state in India. The customized model here systematically analy...

There is a huge demand for the broad range information and status on the forest, which can be useful for monitoring the progress towards the sustainable forest management. Allometry is the statistical relationship between the dimensions of trees and their other properties and is a useful tool for obtaining information of the species with respect to...

Historically, accurate knowledge of the size, behavior and spatial distribution of the human population has been useful for understanding many social and political processes and phenomenon. The quality and availability of census data for a growing proportion of the world’s population is continuing to deteriorate. Night lights have shown encouraging...

This study attempts to assess forest fragmentation and degradation in response to land use/land cover changes in Song watershed, India during 1998–2014. Landsat TM and Landsat 8 OLI satellite data across two dates (1998 and 2014) were used to analyze land use/land cover change and its impact on forest cover. The extent of forest degradation was ana...

The relationship between trajectories of forest cover change and fragmentation due to physical and anthropogenic activities in Sariska Tiger Reserve is addressed in the article. The authors conducted a field visit to the reserve to collect groundtruth data and perform a village survey. Thereafter, their main method consisted of using Landsat TM ima...

Landscape health is a primary concern for management of resources and restoration of habitats of various fauna and avifauna in watershed. We derived landscape health index using Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite data of 1987 and 2011. Standard precipitation index, normalized difference water index, normalized difference moisture index, normalized d...

The paper utilized Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 8 OLI for analyzing land use/land cover change and its impact on land surface temperature in Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, India. Split window algorithm and spectral radiance model were used for determining land surface temperature from Landsat 8 OLI and Landsat 5 TM, respectively. The land use land cover...

We used forest canopy density model for examining spatial–temporal variation in canopy closure in Sundarban Forest in India and validated the health with fragmentation model. Statistics derived through forest canopy model revealed that most of the changes in forest canopy density occurred in 60–80 % class during 1990–2011. Areas having >80 % and 40...

Assessment of flood risk zonation and landscape vulnerability to flood are fundamental aspects in flood risk management. Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and ASTER DEM data were used to assess landscape vulnerability to flood inundation and flood risk in Malda district of West Bengal state, India. Flood inundation map was prepared on the bas...

Agriculture plays an important role in Indian economy. Comprehensive, reliable and timely information on agriculture resource is very much necessary for a country like India for making decisions for all agricultural related problems. The study makes an attempt to estimate the crop acreage of Boro paddy with the help of remote sensing and GIS techni...

This paper examines agricultural land-use change and its drivers in the lower Barpani watershed, Assam. The focus is on agricultural land-use change dynamics occurred due to seasonal variation of rainfall within the watershed. Remote Sensing data of pre and post monsoon were used in this study to analyze the pattern of agricultural land use dynamic...