An assessment of environmental flow requirements of Indian river basins

River basins / Environmental flows / Assessment / Hydrology / Ecology / Ecosystems / Water allocation / Water requirements / Time series / India

Locating the poor: Spatially disaggregated poverty maps for Sri Lanka

Poverty / Mapping

Simulating land use change for assessing future dynamics of land and water resources

Models of land use change fall into two broad categories: pattern based and process based. This thesis focuses on pattern based land use change models, expanding our understanding of these models in three important ways. First, it is demonstrated that some driving variables do not have a smooth impact on the land use transition process. Our example variable is access to water. Land managers with access to piped water do not have any need for surface or groundwater. For variables like this, a model needs to change the way that driving variables are represented. The second important result is that including a variable which captures spatial correlation between land use types significantly increases the explanatory power of the prediction model. A major weakness of pattern based land use models is their inability to model interactions between neighbouring land parcels; the method proposed in this study can be an alternative to account for spatial neighbourhood association. These innovations are applied using the CLUE-S (Conversion of Land Use and its Effects at Small regional extent) system to the Deep Creek watershed in the Southern Interior of British Columbia. The results highlight the challenge of balancing the protection of agricultural land and conserving forest and natural areas when population and economic growth are inevitable. The results also demonstrate the implications of land use change on existing land use policies. The calibrated model was validated using remote sensing data. A series of discriminant functions were estimated for each land use type in the recent period and these functions were then used to classify. The calibrated model was run in reverse, back to the generated land use classification, and results compared. Fit was reasonable with error rates falling below ten percent when radii beyond 2.5 km were considered. Another important contribution is demonstrating the importance of modelling dynamic variables. Some important drivers are changing continuously and others depend on land use change itself. Failure to update these variables will bias model forecasts. Spatial neighbourhood association, an endogenous variable governed by land use change itself, is again used as the example dynamic variable. The study demonstrates the importance of updating all associated information.  Graduate Studies, College of (Okanagan)Graduat

An assessment of environmental flow requirements of Indian river basins

In Amarasinghe, Upali A.; Shah, Tushaar; Malik, R. P. S. (Eds.). Strategic Analyses of the National River Linking Project (NRLP) of India, Series 1: India?s water future: scenarios and issues. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (IWMI

Locating the poor: spatially disaggregated poverty maps for Sri Lanka

This report presents the results of subnational poverty estimation using aggregate poverty statistics and how they can help policy interventions. In particular, they estimate the poverty map across the DS division level in Sri Lanka. The poverty map depicts the proportion of households below the poverty line, which is based on household expenditure for food for obtaining the minimum calorie requirement