Hydrology and Watershed Services in the Western Ghats of India
Krishnaswamy, J., Lele, S. and Jayakumar, R. (2006) (Eds.) Hydrology and Watershed
Services in the Western Ghats of India: Effects of land use and land cover change.
Tata-McGraw-Hill, New Delhi, India.
ISBN 0-07-058568-7
The Western Ghats of India-a mountainous, forested region running parallel to the west
coast of the Indian Peninsula-is one of the 25 global hotspots of biodiversity. These
mountains are the sites of some of the heaviest rainfall in India-the runoff from which
generates most of the hydropower and provides water to about 245 million people.
This region contains more than 30 percent of all plant, bird, and mammal species found in India.
These forest ecosystems also generate significant benefits to local communities, such as fuelwood,
grazing, fodder, timber, leaf manure, food and medicines, and commercial non-timber forest
products. These forest and grassland ecosystems have undergone extensive conversion to non-forest
land-cover and the remnant areas are subject to intensive human use with major negative impacts
on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
The papers in this book represent a first attempt to capture the entire range of on-going hydrologic
and socio-economic research on the effects of land-cover change on watershed service in the Western
Ghats. This book is an attempt to summarise what we know and what we don't about hydrology in the
Western Ghats. It will serve as a baseline fore future research, policy discussions and conservation
activities. It will be of high reference value to the scientific community, government, policy makers,
environmental activists and students of hydrology, biodiversity and ecology.
About the authors:
Jagdish Krishnaswamy is Fellow, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE),
Bangalore and Research Fellow, Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS), Bangalore. He has a B. Tech in
Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Bombay), an MS in Statistics and
a PhD in Environmental Science, Duke University, North Carolina. His research and teaching interests
are diverse and include watershed hydrology, applications of remote sensing in landscape analyses,
applied landscape ecology and statistics.
Sharachchandra Lele is Senior Fellow and Coordinator, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment
and Development (CISED), Bangalore. He has a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering (IIT-Bombay), an MS in
Systems Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a PhD in Energy and Resources from
the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include analyses of institutional,
economic, ecological and technological issues in forest, energy and water resource management.
R. Jayakumar is Programme Specialist for Science, Technology and Environment, UNESCO, Beijing. He has
a BSc. from the University of Madras, an MSc in Geology from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu and a
PhD in Hydrogeology from Bharathidasan University, Tamil Nadu. His research and science administration
interests include hydrogeology, water resource management and irrigation water management. He has
contributed significantly in the capacity building of many research institutions in India through
various UNESCO initiatives.
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