ECO-ENVIRONMENTAL VULNERABILITY ZONATION IN ESSENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The concern of present-day conservation of eco-environment and its approach is to diminish the vulnerability, which demands focus region identification and protection. The identification of the focus region needs greater expertise and management. However, assessment of eco-environmental vulnerability requires numerous variables. The variables are categorised under four extensive aspects namely, hydro-meteorology, land resources, topography and socio-economic factors. The Pombar watershed enfolds three main urbanised cities Bargur, Thirupattur and Uthangarai connected by state-highway (SH-179A) and most of the settlements are situated near foothill regions. Thus, the cultural features persisting in the watershed are subjected to eco-environment vulnerable conditions. Therefore, extraction of variables is carried out using Landsat 8 OLI, Sentinel-2B, ALOS PALSAR DEM and IMD rainguage data respectively. The generated parameters affecting the environment are weighed and ranked through the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) with Geospatial technology for eco-environment vulnerability assessment. Then vulnerability level is categorised into five classes like very high, high, moderate, low and very low with an area of 10%, 12%, 37%, 23%, and 18% respectively. The very high and high classes are distributed in low lying plain regions, where there is high anthropogenic activities, urbanisation and industrialisation, a moderate vulnerable class is more in plateau region due to deforestation and over exploitation. However, very low and low classes are sparsely distributed in higher altitude. The integration of Geospatial technology with AHP makes a powerful tool to assess the eco-environment vulnerability and therefore, three focus regions are demarcated to devote a massive concern on protection and management in the essence of sustainable development.