Download or read book Water Heritage of Sri Lanka written by Jayaratna Banda Disanayaka and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Heritage of Sri Lanka written by Jayaratna Banda Disanayaka and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water in Culture written by Jayaratna Banda Disanayaka and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sri Lankan Water Heritage written by Jayaratna Banda Disanayaka and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Heritage of Sri Lanka written by D. L. O. Mendis and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sri Lanka written by Kusum Athukorala and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Plants of Sri Lanka written by W. Henry De Thabrew and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water for People and Nature written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributed articles.
Download or read book Water Plants of Sri Lanka written by W. Henry De Thabrew and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ecology and Biogeography in Sri Lanka written by C.H. Fernando and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the late Professor Joachim Illies suggested in 1980 that I edit a volume of the Monographiae Biologicae on Sri Lanka, I was glad to accept the challenge. Although I had spent only six years of my research and teaching career in Sri Lanka, I had made personal contact or corresponded with many scientists who had worked in, still work in, or who have studied material from Sri Lanka. The present domicile of the authors of the chapters in this volume shows the wide geographic spread of interest in Sri Lanka, and indicates also the dispersion of Sri Lankan scientists like myself. Sri Lanka has had a relatively long history of indigenous scientific research in the natural sciences. From the early work of Kelaart (1852, Prodromous Fauna Zeylanicae, Ceylon Govt. Press, 250 pp.) to the present time, there has been a more or less sustained research effort in the natural sciences. The Colombo Museum, which celebrated its centenary only a few years ago, and the world famous Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, served as repositories and bases for continued research on the fauna and flora. There are a number of land marks in these studies.
Download or read book Sri Lanka written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Projects and Technologies in Asia written by Hyoseop Woo and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of highly refined articles on historical water projects and traditional water technologies of international interest in the Asian region, addressing information on past water projects (mostly before the 20th century) in the Asian regions that are technically and culturally of interest and educationally valuable. This book explores historical water projects in these regions, presenting technologies used at the time, including calculation and forecasting methods, measurement, material, labor, methodologies, and even water culture. It is expected that the old Asian wisdom of "reviewing the old and learning the new" would be realized to a certain extent in modern planning and practice of water projects. This book will enable the reader to understand historical water projects and technologies in the Asian region. It can be used as a one-stop resource to source notable Asian water projects and their relevance to modern-day technology. In this regard, this book is expected to be of interest to a variety of audiences, including the corresponding Asian regions and other international audiences interested in Asian water history from an engineering perspective.
Download or read book Landscapes and Societies written by I. Peter Martini and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains case histories intended to show how societies and landscapes interact. The range of interest stretches from the small groups of the earliest Neolithic, through Bronze and Iron Age civilizations, to modern nation states. The coexistence is, of its very nature reciprocal, resulting in changes in both society and landscape. In some instances the adaptations may be judged successful in terms of human needs, but failure is common and even the successful cases are ephemeral when judged in the light of history. Comparisons and contrasts between the various cases can be made at various scales from global through inter-regional, to regional and smaller scales. At the global scale, all societies deal with major problems of climate change, sea-level rise, and with ubiquitous problems such as soil erosion and landscape degradation. Inter-regional differences bring out significant detail with one region suffering from drought when another suffers from widespread flooding. For example, desertification in North Africa and the Near East contrasts with the temperate countries of southern Europe where the landscape-effects of deforestation are more obvious. And China and Japan offer an interesting comparison from the standpoint of geological hazards to society - large, unpredictable and massively erosive rivers in the former case, volcanoes and accompanying earthquakes in the latter. Within the North African region localized climatic changes led to abandonment of some desertified areas with successful adjustments in others, with the ultimate evolution into the formative civilization of Egypt, the "Gift of the Nile". At a smaller scale it is instructive to compare the city-states of the Medieval and early Renaissance times that developed in the watershed of a single river, the Arno in Tuscany, and how Pisa, Siena and Florence developed and reached their golden periods at different times depending on their location with regard to proximity to the sea, to the main trunk of the river, or in the adjacent hills. Also noteworthy is the role of technology in opening up opportunities for a society. Consider the Netherlands and how its history has been formed by the technical problem of a populous society dealing with too much water, as an inexorably rising sea threatens their landscape; or the case of communities in Colorado trying to deal with too little water for farmers and domestic users, by bringing their supply over a mountain chain. These and others cases included in the book, provide evidence of the successes, near misses and outright failures that mark our ongoing relationship with landscape throughout the history of Homo sapiens. The hope is that compilations such as this will lead to a better understanding of the issue and provide us with knowledge valuable in planning a sustainable modus vivendi between humanity and landscape for as long as possible. Audience: The book will interest geomorphologists, geologists, geographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, environmentalists, historians and others in the academic world. Practically, planners and managers interested in landscape/environmental conditions will find interest in these pages, and more generally the increasingly large body of opinion in the general public, with concerns about Planet Earth, will find much to inform their opinions. Extra material: The color plate section is available at http://extras.springer.com
Download or read book World Water Assessment Programme Sri Lanka Case Study written by K. A. U. S. Imbulana and published by IWMI. This book was released on 2002-04-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Case Study Workshop was organized with the objective of obtaining the necessary input the experts on different subject areas of water resources, subject those views and discussion among the stakeholder agencies, and synthesize the information to a report on the case study. The outcome of the Workshop would eventually transform into the contribution of Sri Lanka to the forst WWDR
Download or read book Water Culture in South Asia written by Suzanne Hanchett and published by Development Resources Press. This book was released on 2014-11-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Water is life” in Bangladesh. This book introduces the reader to the vast range of meanings that water has in this South Asian country. Mythology, ancient sciences, folklore, and language provide a cultural foundation for water's uses in the home. One chapter is devoted to the problem of arsenic in drinking water. Includes Glossary, Bibliography, 70 photos, Index. Reviews and Endorsements Interesting and important for anyone working in water in Bangladesh and worldwide. If only there were such books for all countries!” -Joke Mulwijk, Executive Director, Gender and Water Alliance “A group of authors...have in this delightful book explored familiar cultural nuances: nuances that generally escape the notice of policy makers sitting in distant headquarters formulating policies for villagers.”....“The authors have narrated myths related to ponds, for instance.... Each aspect of cultural use has been described in so much detail and with such authenticity that, but for the paucity of space, one feels like reproducing the entire book here.”.... “Conventionally, policy makers always neglect the cultural aspects of any new product they have introduced. But it became apparent that there were side effects of having water from tube wells: people would get afflicted with skin diseases, including cancer, because of the arsenic content present in the water.”.... “Even though the focus of this book is Bangladesh, its lessons hold true for India and Pakistan as well, another strong indication of how each of them share a common culture….” -Professor Bidyut Mohanty, Head, Women’s Studies Department, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. Review published in Social Change (2016)
Download or read book Lagoons of Sri Lanka written by Silva, E. I. L. and published by IWMI. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sri Lanka, an island in the Indian Ocean, has lagoons along 1,338 km of its coastline. They experience low-energy oceanic waves and semidiurnal microtidal currents. The Sri Lankan coastal lagoons are not numerous but they are diverse in size, shape, configuration, ecohydrology, and ecosystem values and services. The heterogeneous nature, in general, and specific complexities, to a certain extent, exhibited by coastal lagoons in Sri Lanka are fundamentally determined by coastal and adjoining hinterland geomorphology, tidal fluxes and fluvial inputs, monsoonal-driven climate and weather, morphoedaphic attributes, and cohesive interactions with human interventions.Most coastal lagoons in Sri Lanka are an outcome of mid-Holocene marine transgression and subsequent barrier formation and spit development enclosing the water body between the land and the sea. This process has varied from one coastal stretch to another due to wave-derived littoral drift, sediment transport by tidal fluxes, fluvial inputs and wave action or, in other words, sea-level history, shore-face dynamics and tidal range as the three major factors that control the origin and maintenance of the sandy barrier, the most important features for the formation and evolution of coastal lagoons with their landward water mass. In certain stretches of Sri Lanka’s coastline, formation of the barrier spit was very active due to shore-face dynamics that resulted in chains of shore parallel, elongated lagoons. They are among the most productive in terms of ecosystem yield and show some similarities to large tropical lagoons with respect to sea entrance, zonation, biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, some of them become seasonally hypersaline due to lack of freshwater input and high evaporation. Functions and processes of some of these water bodies are fairly known. There are a fair number of small back-barrier lagoons of different shapes and sizes whose origin goes back to sea-level history. They are located on low-energy coasts with prominent beach ridges and restricted hinterland geomorphology. Mixing processes of these landward indentations are hindered by elevated sand dunes, and their salinity increases due to poor freshwater input and high evaporation leading to seasonally hypersaline conditions. These sedimented lagoons, primarily confined to the southeastern coast of the island, are biologically the least productive, with limited ecosystem values and services. Another group of moderately elongated semicircular, slightly large lagoons in the same coast, formed exclusively by submergence due to mid-Holocene sea-level rises, do not receive sufficient freshwater input leading to seasonally hypersaline conditions. They are also biologically unproductive but some are ecologically important since they provide habitats conducive to migratory birds. In contrast, some lagoons on the southern coast receive sufficient freshwater via streams draining the wet zone, maintain more estuarine salinities, exhibit rich biodiversity and serve as functional resource units. Lagoons formed by mid-Holocene submergence and recession of water level with simultaneous chain barrier formation on the high energy southwest coast, which includes cliffs, small bays and headlands, show peculiar configurations and link channel characteristics. Some of these irregular water bodies have clusters of small isles and luxuriant mangrove swamps with high biodiversity but not very rich in catadromous finfish and shellfish species due to the restricted nature of the entrance channel and nondistinct salinity gradients. The barrier-built, seasonally hypersaline lagoon complex in the Jaffna Peninsula, the largest lagoon system in the country with multiple perennial entrances show extremely narrow salinity ranges towards the upper limit of salinity. The main lagoon is elongated and the shore parallel to eastward and southward extensions is connected by narrow channels. The other lagoon in the Jaffna Peninsula is elongated, shore parallel and ribbon-shaped and receives tidal water throughout the year but freshwater is received only from precipitation and surface runoff. Even though the lagoons in the peninsula are extremely rich in ecosystem heterogeneity their hydrology and hydrodynamics have been severely disturbed by infrastructural development for transportation and by attempts to create a freshwater river for Jaffna. There are a few virgin lagoons of moderate size also on the northern coast, south of the Jaffna Peninsula on both the east and west sides. They look very typical tropical lagoons rich in biodiversity and biological production but their structure, functions and values are virtually unknown in scientific or socioeconomic terms. The lagoons located on the east coast are not numerous but relatively large in extent. They are also an outcome not only of mid-Holocene sea-level rises but of submerged multi-delta valleys or abandoned paleo estuaries. When inundated, the multi-delta valley configuration became elongated and is shore parallel with a smooth seaward shoreline; both shorelines become irregular when coastal waves are weak, and internal waves are created by the action of local winds. Configuration of a lagoon formed by inundation of an abandoned river valley is irregular with a long entrance channel extended landward. These lagoons are highly productive with a variety of associated ecosystems, large open water areas and wide perennial sea entrances. When the lagoon is too much elongated, zonation is prominent due to fewer entrance effects. Lagoons form a particular type of natural capital which generates use values (fish, shrimp, fuelwood, salt, fodder, ecotourism, anchorage, recreation, etc.) and nonuse values (habitat preservation, biodiversity, ecosystem linkages, etc.) contributing positively towards improving the human well-being. Of many values of lagoons in Sri Lanka, only the extractive values are generally utilized at present, by way of fish and shrimp catches, salt production and use of mangrove for various purposes. Besides, coastal lagoons generate a range of nonextractive use values and nonuse values, which could add towards the total economic value. Misuse has taken place at several instances when “use” adversely affects the status of the resources or the health of the ecosystem due to vulnerability and poverty, population pressure, urbanization, development activities and multi-stakeholder issues. The status of lagoon resources shows that the resources in the majority of Sri Lankan lagoons still remain satisfactory, somewhat good or very good. Nevertheless, concerns for management of lagoons in Sri Lanka exist only where “use values” (extractive values, such as fish and shrimp) exist. There is no evidence of resources management in lagoons for inspirational, scholarly values or tacit knowledge of the same. Management for use values exhibits several stages from zero management to comanagement via community management and state intervention. Most of Sri Lanka’s lagoons have the potential for generating high extractive and nonextractive use values which could improve the human well-being, while maintaining resources sustainability. Unfortunately, these potentials have not been understood or “seen” yet by the relevant authorities, although a few instances of exploring this potential were noticed.
Download or read book The value of traditional water schemes small tanks in the Kala Oya Basin Sri Lanka written by Shamen Vidanage and published by IUCN. This book was released on 2005 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
