Assessment of Groundwater Quality of the Central Gangetic Plain Area of India Using Geospatial and WQI Techniques

The paper presents results of research to determine the health risk of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) in soils of gold mining area in Ilesha, Southwestern Nigeria. Eighteen top soil samples were collected and analysed for PTEs using ICPMS. The pollution level in soils were assessed using pollution load index (PLI) and potential ecological risk index (PERI). The human health risk was assessed using hazard index (HI), non-carcinogenic risk index and carcinogenic risk index. All the PTEs were higher than crustal average values except Fe and follow the order Mn > Ba > Cr > Zn > Cu > Ni > Pb > Co >Fe > As > Cd. The soil samples can be classified as unpolluted to moderately polluted (0.18-1.23) and low risk (15.28-94.24) based on PLI and PERI respectively. The values of hazard Index (HI) calculated for child and adult population for all the pathways were <1 and pose no obvious non carcinogenic risk to the population except for ingestion pathway where 33% of the samples showed value >1 in child population. As, Co, Cd and Pb constituted high cancer risk in the study area with child at higher risk than adult. The Total Cancer Risk (TCR) in the study area based on all the pathways ranges between 0.19 -3.86 and 0.18-3.58 for child and adult respectively and the ingestion route seems to be the major contributor to excess lifetime cancer risk followed by the dermal pathway.     

Chemical weathering and gully erosion causing land degradation in a complex river basin of Eastern India: an integrated field,analytical and artificial intelligence approach

Hot and humid subtropical plateau regions are susceptible to land degradation in the form of weathering and gully erosion. Here, we investigate chemical weathering, gully erosion and cohesiveness through field-based measurements with a view to understand the controlling factors of potential land degradation, in complex river basin of the Chotanagpur plateau region in Eastern India. The layers of controlling factors of gully erosion were developed and prioritized considering boosted regression tree (BRT), alternative decision tree (ADT), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random forest (RF) algorithms in the R software, and the results of these methods were also validated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The spectroscopic analysis was carried out of collected soil samples to measure the degree of chemical weathering and cohesiveness. Furthermore, the climatic elements like temperature and rainfall were also considered for estimating the chemical weathering. The results of the gully erosion models (i.e., BRT, ADT, PSO and RF) show remarkable accuracy with ROC values of 0.93, 0.89, 0.91 and 0.84, respectively. An advanced decision tree model was integrated with the results of degree of chemical weathering and cohesiveness in geographical information system platform. The land degradation map developed from this approach shows that 10.53% of the study area is highly affected, whereas 17.36% area is moderately affected and the rest of the 73.85% area is less affected by land degradation. Our results provide essential information for policy makers in adopting measures for minimizing and controlling the land degradation. Our novel approach is significant to assess land degradation to a large scale.