A basin scale study on carbon nutrient and metal pollution and ecological risk in the Ganga River and hooghly River estuary

Abstract

Rivers, all around the world, are struggling to cope with multiple human perturbations. newlineGrowing human population and agricultural intensification in India and around the newlineworld have led to increased riverine loads of carbon, nutrients and heavy metals. These newlineinputs together with industrial release and atmospheric deposition have altered the key newlineprocesses and ecosystem functions in the rivers. In India, different parts of the Ganga newlineRiver, all along its 2525 km long course, receive invariably high amount of human newlinereleases (urban, industrial, agricultural etc.) that have devastated the water quality of newlinethe river. Although most studies on the Ganga River have focussed on specific water newlinequality variables or have attempted to address these issues on local and short-term newlinescales, recent studies have shown the relevance of scale and those of understanding newline mechanistic links between the drivers of changes and response of the river ecosystem newline(Jaiswal and Pandey 2019; Siddiqui et al., 2020). These attempts helps to identify gaps newlinein current understanding of riverine response across river-estuary continuum newline