Access to Water-Related Services Strongly Modulates Human Development

Water enables health, education, and economic well-being opportunities for humanity. Access to basic water and sanitation services, freshwater variability, and water storage are some of the dimensions that may impact on human development worldwide. Yet few studies quantitatively explore the relationship between water and human development....

Dam-induced hydrological alterations in the upper Cauvery river basin, India

Study region: Upper Cauvery river basin, India Study focus: Reservoir construction is one of the major contributors to changes in natural river flow regime characteristics. This study aims to understand the hydrological alterations resulting from the construction of reservoirs and water abstraction in the upper regions of the basin. The...

Anthropogenic modifications and river ecosystem services: A landscape perspective

The process of development has led to the modification of river landscapes. This has created imbalances between ecological, economic, and socio-cultural uses of ecosystem services (ESs), threatening the biotic and social integrity of rivers. Anthropogenic modifications influence river landscapes on multiple scales, which impact river-flow...

Mapping ecological production and benefits from water consumed in agricultural and natural landscapes: A case study of the Pangani Basin

Scarcity of information on the water productivity of different water, land, and other ecosystems in Africa, hampers the optimal allocation of the limited water resources. This study presents an innovative method to quantify the spatial variability of biomass production, crop yield, and economic water productivity, in a data scarce landscape...

Coupling land-use change and hydrologic models for quantification of catchment ecosystem services

Representation of land-use and hydrologic interactions in respective models has traditionally been problematic. The use of static land-use in most hydrologic models or that of the use of simple hydrologic proxies in land-use change models call for more integrated approaches. The objective of this study is to assess whether dynamic feedback...