Abstract
Bhagirathi and Jalangi are two distributaries of the river Padma. River Jalangi is tributary to the river Bhagirathi and they meet at Swarupganj, Nadia. Jalangi is a dying river whereas, Bhagirathi is an active river. There are many wetlands in the interfluves of these two rivers. We selected five amongst them and these two rivers and made a cross sectional study of water quality to explore the inter wetlands and inter river trend in water quality and ecological health and to investigate the drivers of ecological stress on water quality. To these ends, we applied tools of different water quality indices like WAWQI, CPI, HPI, OPI, and EI. We confirm that the concentration of dissolved oxygen is critically low (DO = 2.62 gm/l) for the selected wetlands indicating poor water quality. Besides, the values of EI indicate that all the wetlands are eutrophic in nature (EI>1) representing poor ecological health. However, the values of CPI indicate that the water can be used for domestic, irrigation and industrial purposes. Moreover, the low concentration of heavy metals have been observed in the wetland water representing pollution free water based on the values of HPI. Therefore, considering all the parameters mentioned, the water quality of Bhagirathi river is better in comparison to Jalangi river and five wetlands. This is because mainly of the fact that the Bhagirathi river is very active and therefore the pollution dilution capacity is high.
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Sarkar, B., Das, B.C. (2022). A Cross-Sectional Study on the Water Quality and Ecosystem Health of the Jalangi and Bhagirathi River and Their Selected Oxbow-Lakes. In: Islam, A., Das, P., Ghosh, S., Mukhopadhyay, A., Das Gupta, A., Kumar Singh, A. (eds) Fluvial Systems in the Anthropocene. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11181-5_19
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