Browsing by Author "Matz, D."

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Investigation of the Impact of Commonland Protection on Water Resources in Rural India using Hydrogeological Methods
(2011) Matz, D.; Moysey, S.; Ravindranath, R.
"Sustainable watershed management plans must view groundwater as a common pool resource for which stakeholders have a shared responsibility for both development and protection. While hydrologic monitoring methods and water balance models are commonly used to develop plans for managing the demands on water within a watershed, it is less common that these techniques are applied to understanding the impacts of commonland conservation and management activities. This lack of practical and quantitative tools for assessing the impacts of communal management activities may therefore erode the long-term community support for such activities. In this study we present a case study where simple monitoring strategies and volume balance methods are applied to understanding the impact of artificial groundwater recharge from a percolation pond in the Salri watershed of Madhya Pradesh, India. The percolation pond is formed by a dam constructed by villagers on commonlands to capture monsoon rainfall. Water seeps from the pond into the subsurface to be stored in aquifers downstream of the dam until it is needed in the dry season. We use a simple water balance model constrained by changes in water level in the pond to estimate the volume of water contributed to the subsurface from the pond as a result of the 2009- 2010 monsoon to be about 1.3x105 m3 , or about twice the volume of the pond at its peak capacity. The volume of water contributed to groundwater by the pond is about 7% of the total rainfall occurring within the entire watershed or almost 30% of rainfall falling directly upstream of the dam. The pond also affects surface water flows in the watershed as flows immediately downstream of the dam run through November, whereas significant discharge at the outlet of the watershed ceased by the end of September. If it is assumed that the water captured by the dam would have previously been lost from the watershed as surface flow during the monsoon, then the intervention has reduced runoff from the watershed by about a factor of 1/3. This study shows that simple monitoring and modeling techniques makes it possible to determine the impact water harvesting has to conserve water resources and help improve the commonlands."