Land use changes and their impact on Soil and vegetation properties over
Kanshi watershed, Potohar Plateau, Pakistan
Abstract
Large scale changes in land use pattern such as deforestation and
machine-intensive farming process have increased carbon concentrations
in atmosphere which negatively affects agricultural sector.
Cross-disciplinary approaches were applied to investigate the land use
changes and their impacts on the soil properties over Kanshi watershed.
The results revealed that vegetation cover has been declined over the
Kanshi catchment area during the last two decades. The deforestation and
urbanization are the basic reasons for the fall of water tables in the
Kanshi catchment area. Furthermore, the decreasing trend of rainfall and
increasing trend of temperature was estimated during the last two
decades. While the water discharge was decreased by 44.15 % during the
last two decades in the Kanshi watershed. This substantial and
significant change resultant due to climate change or increased
intercession of anthropogenic activities on the earth surface. The
highest stream flow was found in 1992 in the Kanshi catchment due to
heavy rainfall. But in 2019, flow was on its peak value. Such variations
in flow of stream increase due to fluctuations in rainfall pattern and
vegetation cover resulted land degradation. 85% of local community is
agreed that extensive agricultural practices, population growth,
settlement patterns and brick industry have significant negative impact
on vegetative cover and water discharge.