Hydrological maps as a tool for the exploration of historical water systems at Badami, Karnataka, India

Research on the Value of Water-Related Cultural Heritage Architecture from Historical Environmental Records: Evidence from the Li River Basin in China

“…However, the curves for Anfu County, Sangzhi County, and Shimen County showed an upward trend in the 4-8 km range, indicating that there were more heritage sites farther from the river. At the same time, the examination of the distribution of the heritage sites far from the modern river network shows four possibilities, as follows: 1 ⃝ beyond 4-8 km from the ancient Li River main stream, there may be multiple extinct tributary river systems or palaeohydrological system data not recorded in CHGIS 1820 (such as the Dao River tributary of the Li River); 2 ⃝ the upstream urban area of Sangzhi County presented a narrow band distribution, showing a clear tendency for heritage sites to be located either near or far from the main Li River; 3 ⃝ the trend in downstream Anfu County reflects that the water-related sites may have been severely affected by disasters such as floods, and these sites gradually moved away from the flood-prone areas of tributary rivers; 4 ⃝ some water-related sites may have been located in nonwaterfront settlement cities or distant mountainous areas, built to ensure the safety of daily travel or the transportation of goods.…”

“…Furthermore, the structures exhibit good cultural transmission, strong temporal continuity, widespread spatial distribution, empirical stability, and a combination of human and natural attributes. As a result, they possess essential conditions for recording historical changes in water, climate, and urban environments during different historical periods [4][5][6]; a thorough and effective study of them constitutes an important framework for studying the evolution of people-water-city environments.…”

“…However, the environmental indicators value of WRCHA in the field of human-waterurban environment changes is not prominently featured [12]. There are still significant research gaps and limitations, as follows: (1) most studies chose remote sensing interpretation methods to identify changes in water body characteristics within the last 100 years or reconstructed historical water level data through deposition, interpolation, and inversion algorithms [4], but very few have used humanistic data as a substitute index to characterize Land 2024, 13, 838 3 of 21 changes in ancient hydrological environments; (2) there are few correlation analyses of WRCHA with factors such as droughts, floods, and population in the same period, and there is a lack of dual human-natural systems, as well as a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, to analyze the spatial and temporal couplings of human, water, and the historical environment of the city.…”