A review on general characteristics, classification and degradation of river systems
Vishal Kamboj, Nitin Kamboj, Nivedita Sharma
Abstract
Rivers play an important role in the life of human beings. Most of the ancient cities are situated near the river systems and peoples were dependent on it for their livelihood needs, transportation, and raw material for construction, drinking and irrigation purpose. The degradation of the river system is based on river bed material and discharge of environmental pollution such as wastewater, agricultural runoff, and also tourism activities. Besides this, discharge of wastewater, tourism activity, and agricultural runoff into the river causes the eutrophication condition due to the discharge of nutrients in excess amount. The mining activity also affects the floodplain area and riparian zone of the river which causes the flood condition in the river. The mining activities led to change the channel morphology characteristic, increased the progressive degradation in upstream and downstream stretch and also it changes the substrate structure of the river. These activities directly affect the aquatic biodiversity and river regime. For preventing the river system some natural material and man-made methods such as plantation of vegetation and trees, training the river bank with stone, rocks. Therefore, this chapter emphasizes how the rivers system is classified on the basis of sources, geomorphological characteristics, river age, stream order, biotic zone classification and whitewater classification methods and also discuss the degradation of the river system by the river bed material and environmental pollution activities.