ABSTRACT
Water is the most essential and necessary need for every life on the earth, getting distributed irregularly and degrading for several reasons, considering it is less natural and more human-made. Because of the significance of element water in the entire ecosystem and the deuteriation of water resources over time, its management is ultimately our responsibility. The earth’s water cycle explains the different water forms available on the planet and their interaction with the environment. From various authentic documents, the global distribution of water can be found as 97.5% of the total water is ocean water. The rest, 2.5% water, comes from freshwater, including glacier water, groundwater, permafrost water, and surface and atmospheric water. This surface and atmospheric water is distributed in six forms, freshwater lakes, wetlands, soil moisture, rivers, atmosphere, and plants and animals. Among all these water resources, groundwater, freshwater lakes, and rivers are the primary water sources for all human activities. The world is presently facing a fall in the overall number of the water bodies’ presence on the earth and continuously waning of the water resources’ dimension and quality due 268to the inadequate understanding of the management of natural resources. India is also in not much better condition while facing these consequences; however, ancient India was so rich in its hydraulic structure that it comprises natural water resources like rivers, lakes, and human-made water bodies like ponds. But over time, these water resources get decayed like either narrowed or completely lost, because of the lack of proper management and insufficient knowledge about managing it. This chapter focuses on one of the water resources, that is, the river, specifically the Yamuna River in India for the sacred Mathura district, which is waning with time. This chapter also covers the overview of water resources, causes of their degradation, and their management. Since remote sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) make the process easy nowadays for assessing the spatiotemporal distribution of water resources, change in their dynamics, and quality of the ground and surface water. Therefore, this chapter’s main objective is to assess the Yamuna River’s degradation on a spatiotemporal scale through satellite imagery and an area survey that ultimately covers the causes behind the degradation of this river. Through satellite images, the assessment is done for four decades to show the changes in the river Yamuna’s dimension and flow direction within this stretch.
