The Applications of GIS in the Analysis of the Impacts of Human Activities on South Texas Watersheds

Abstract

With water resource planning assuming greater importance in environmental protection efforts, analyzing the health of agricultural watersheds using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) becomes essential for decision-makers in Southern Texas. Within the area, there exist numerous threats from conflicting land uses. These include the conversion of land formerly designated for agricultural purposes to other uses. Despite current efforts, anthropogenic factors are greatly contributing to the degradation of watersheds. Additionally, the activities of waste water facilities located in some of the counties, rising populations, and other socioeconomic variables are negatively impacting the quality of water in the agricultural watersheds. To map the location of these stressors spatially and the extent of their impacts across time, the paper adopts a mix scale method of temporal spatial analysis consisting of simple descriptive statistics. In terms of objectives, this research provides geo-spatial analysis of the effects of human activities on agricultural watersheds in Southern Texas and the factors fuelling the concerns under the purview of watershed management. The results point to growing ecosystem decline across time and a geographic cluster of counties experiencing environmental stress. Accordingly, the emergence of stressors such as rising population, increased use of fertilizer treatments on farm land, discharges of atmospheric pollutants and the large presence of municipal and industrial waste treatment facilities emitting pathogens and pesticides directly into the agricultural watersheds pose a growing threat to the quality of the watershed ecosystem.

The Influence of Land Use on the Grassland Fire Occurrence in the Northeastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China

“…Water is also a region of intensive human activities. Around this land use type, the human activities are more likely to lead to fire occurrence [52,53]. Within 15 km of urban land, the grassland distribution is relatively limited, and land exploitation is relatively severe.…”

Examining Land Use and Land Cover Spatiotemporal Change and Driving Forces in Beijing from 1978 to 2010

“…Because of a lack of historical remote sensing data, long-term LULC research in Beijing mainly focuses on the period after the reform and opening-up policy in 1978 [21][22][23]. With the rapid urbanization, socioeconomic, political and other anthropogenic driving forces played important roles in LULC change [24][25][26][27][28][29]. However, few studies have explained the LULC change process and policy-driven land use conversion with the combination of socioeconomic data and policy-driving forces.…”

Development of methods for estimating the environmental risk of degradation of the surface water state

“…Water resources management with taking into consideration the analysis of a state of agricultural water catchments with a use of geographic information systems (GIS) becomes essential for solution of environmental problems in South Texas [15]. There are many land-use conflicts in this area and they contributed to degradation of water ecosystems greatly.…”