Map India 2000 - Poster :GIS application for Land Water Interface Production System and Flood Plain Zone Mapping

Methodology and Approach

Formal quantitative survey, including detailed soil survey, water resources audit, crop pattern monitoring and fishing effort monitoring.
Parallel participatory survey with farmers and fishers to understand how they perceive their environment.
Field monitoring plus modelling relationships between farming, fishing, homestead and other activities according to such factors as season, flood depth, socio-economic category, access to labour, access to land, access to common property water bodies.
The modelling tools should include :
- ARC/INFO and ARCVIEW GIS software
- ACCESS Relational Database
- QSR NUD*IST qualitative data analysis

Formulate and evaluate more sustainable and equitable strategies for floodplain management, which will be achieved by involving participatory experimental work to test and develop sustainable resource management options. These will address constraints identified during an earlier project and during the on-going studies. The resource users will appraise options.

Fig.1 Flow chart describing the approach to the study

The above flow chart (Fig. 1) explains the methodology for this kind of approach. Although the survey and monitoring is to be done for the entire region by selecting sample plots, at present only one portion has been completed, which has been presented in this paper.

Fig. 2, showing the different cropping patterns adopted during the course of one year for December'97, March'98 and July'98 respectively, is part of a study taken up in the Centre for Land Use and Water Resources Research, University of Newcastle, UK, under a DFID (Department For International Development) funded project. The study area had been chosen for the purpose of mapping the flood plain zone and exploring the possibilities of a modified flood plain agriculture system. This addresses the spatial and temporal dimensions of floodplain livelihoods. The spread of flood in monsoon months has been shown in Fig. 3, which makes it clear that about 53% of the entire area gets inundated in floods during the peak monsoon month of July. After recession of floods and in dry months main beel, which is about 0.05% of the entire study area of 8.71 km2, remains the only source of irrigation as well as fishery. Nevertheless, there are few flood plain depressions in the area where water gets stored forming small pond like water bodies, which serve the purpose of irrigation and fish harvesting. However, water use should be monitored and managed properly by the local people, which is sustainable.

The socio-economic starting point has been a full census of the villages around the beel and selection of representative households across the whole spectrum of "wealth", which is determined according to land holding, validated by wealth ranking (Fig. 4). The output will be a detailed analysis of who is doing what, where and when, and why are they doing that rather than anything else.

This type of study structure will help identify over-exploited and under-used resources, i.e., areas of conflict and complementarily. Taking this approach will provide an understanding of the overlapping matrix of livelihood strategies and differential use of floodplain resources by different producer group. This can then be used to assess how actions such as using surface water for irrigation will affect various producer groups (fishermen, sharecroppers, large farmers, etc) and social groups. This analysis can also be used in participatory planning and management of floodplain resources, using mutual learning about different group's goals and strategies for floodplain resources to improve approaches such as co-management.

Conclusion
The study is both participatory and interdisciplinary. Integration of social science, soil science, agricultural science, fisheries, hydrology and GIS expertise is the key to the sustainable management and development. Much of the data, particularly in relation to terrestrial resources and terrestrial production, has a spatial dimension. GIS, using the Arc system, has been invaluable for exploring and presenting relationships such as those between flood depth and cropping pattern.

Out of total 4730 agricultural plots, constituting about 8.71 km2 area, in beel, about 2100 plots, constituting about 53% of the total area, get submerged in water destroying the cultivation and livelihood of the local farmers. This phenomenon takes place year after year forcing farmers to look for alternate cropping system and other livelihood means. While the flood depth in the larger affected area is about 0.25m in the monsoon months of July and August, the deeper areas towards the beel get more than 2m deep with beel at water level of 4m depth leaving no chance at all for any kind of cultivation.

A complete account of observations, inferences and suggestions will be come out at the completion of the work. To monitor the sustainability of the development and implementation of the study results, there should be a post-project observation period as well.

Acknowledgements
Authors are thankful to Dr. John W. Gowing and Mr. Julian J.F. Barr, chief scientists executing the project at the Centre for Land Use and Water Resources Research (CLUWRR), University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The first author had worked with the team during her one-year post-doctoral stay with them.

References
Access for Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97 Professional, Users' Guide. Arcview GIS, The Geographic Information System for Everyone, Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc, USA. Mishra, B., 1996, A successful case of participatory watershed management at Ralegan Siddhi village in district Ahmadnagar, Maharashtra, India. Turton, C., Warner, M. and Groom, B., 1998, Scaling up participatory watershed development in India: A review of the literature, Agricultural Research & Extension Network, Network paper no. 86.