New Delhi, Feb 2 Tamil Nadu (11.6 per cent) and Maharashtra (11.2 per cent) have got the high number of wetlands while the Ganga river basin has around one fourth of the wetlands in both numbers (over 56,000) and wetland area (3.75 million hectares (Mha) among the river basins of the country.
These are the findings of the 'National Wetland Decadal Change Atlas' that was released on the occasion of World Wetlands Day 2022 on Wednesday. Formally named as 'Space Based Observation of Indian Wetlands', the Atlas is a documentation of wetlands across India especially with respect to the changes from 2006-07 till 2017-18.
After Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, it is Andhra Pradesh (10.4 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (8.0 per cent) and Gujarat (7.6 per cent) that have high numbers of wetlands.
In case of area coverage with respect to total wetland area (of the country), Gujarat (21.9 per cent) has highest area, followed by Maharashtra (7.2 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (7.14 per cent), West Bengal (7.07 per cent) and Uttar Pradesh (6.9 per cent).
Considering fraction of geographic area of state under wetlands, Goa has got highest wetland percentage (24.6 per cent), followed by Dadra Nagar Haveli (17.8 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (17.3 per cent), Jharkhand (12.7 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (11.3 per cent).
As against that, considering the fraction of total geographic area of the country, Gujarat is the only state which has got more than 1 (one) per cent of wetlands, other states in sequence are Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra (0.35 per cent); West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh (0.34 per cent); Tamil Nadu (0.28 per cent) and, Madhya Pradesh, Assam (0.26 per cent), the Atlas showed.
The Atlas released on Wednesday also documented the changes across 18 major river basins vis-a-vis the analysis of wetlands.
The Ganga river basin has around one fourth of the wetlands in number (over 56,000; 24.2 per cent) and wetland area (3.75 Mha, 23.5 per cent) among the other river basins of the country.
The Luni and rivers of Saurashtra (19.9 per cent) and Krishna (10.4 per cent) are placed second and third in terms of area coverage, respectively after the Ganga basin.
The Krishna river basin has had major wetland area change (0.138 Mha) during the last one decade whereas second and third place are occupied by Godavari (0.125 Mha) and Ganga (0.103 Mha) respectively.
New wetlands are highest in Ganga in terms of numbers (3,263) but Godavari has the highest area (0.093 Mha). Ganga is the wettest basin with 10.9 per cent area under wetlands and contributing the highest wetland area (1.14 per cent of the country's total area) to the country.
Among the bio-geographic zones, the Deccan peninsula occupies around one third of the total wetlands area (5.28 Mha) in the country with second and third place occupied by Coasts (4.71 Mha) and Semi-arid (1.72 Mha) regions.
Decadal change analysis of the wetlands shows major changes in Deccan peninsula with an increase of 0.35 Mha area whereas slight reduction in wetland area was observed in Islands (minus 10,573 ha). As far as new wetlands, which have come up in the last one decade are concerned, the Deccan peninsula has the highest new wetlands at 8,347 covering 0.21 Mha area.
The Atlas delineated a total 20 types of wetlands. The wetland classification categorises inland and coastal at level I, followed by natural and man-made wetlands as level II, which were further categorised into 20 types of wetlands as level III classes. Like the one from 2006-07, this too has been prepared by the Space Applications Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Ahmedabad.
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