STUDY AREA
The Gomati River, a tributary of the Ganga River, originates from the
swampy forested area located near the south of the Himalayan foothills
near the MadhoTanda in Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh, India and
flows in the Ganga Alluvial Plain, which is of Pleistocene–Holocene
origin and an underground fed channel (Kumar and Singh, 1978). The
channel forms an elongate basin, trending in the NW-SE direction. The
regions exhibits three distinct geomorphic surfaces with their
characteristic features, namely, the Upland Terrace Surface
(T2) or Upland Interfluve, River Valley Terrace Surface
(T1), and Active Flood Plain Surface
(T0) (Figure 1). The upland interfluve surface is also
described as Older Alluvium or Bangar and marks the high surface with a
variety of alluvial features, namely bhur ridges, abandoned channels,
lakes, ponds, and patches of alkaline soils (Singh, 1996) exhibiting
kilometer-scale undulations of high and low grounds. The Gomati Basin
experiences a sub-humid, sub-tropical climate within a vast monsoon
regime of the Ganga Plain.
The Lucknow district occupies the central part of Ganga plain and is
bounded longitudinally 80° 32’E –
81° 15’E and latitudinally 26° 30’N
- 27° 10’N which encompasses the Gomati River Basin
(Singh, 1996). The district stands at an elevation of
~123 m above sea level and covering an area of
~2,528 sq. km. The Gomati River exhibits distorted
meandering suggestive of past neo-tectonic activity (Singh, 1996; Thakur
et al., 2009) and comprise more than 630 m thick alluvial deposits of
Quaternary age comprising Newer Alluvium (T0 and
T1 surfaces) i.e. active channels, younger and older
flood plain deposited during upper Pleistocene to recent age (Singh
1996; Singh 2001; Srivastava et al. 2003a), and Older Alluvium
(T2). The mean annual precipitation in the Lucknow
district falls between isohyets of 100 cm and 86 cm (Kant, 2018). Due to
the Gomati River’s water supply, the region is able to sustain a sizable
urban population, while the sub-urban areas are predominately
agricultural. The Gomati River basin comprises huge repositories of
archaeological sites in the middle Ganga Plain (Upadhyay, 2019) but the
biotic studies from these sites are not known, and hence the
palynofacies studies in the modern-day sediments are an aid to address
the palaeoenvironment and palaeoclimate. To investigate the prevalence
and fate of palynofacies in relation to their anthropogenic and natural
manifestations, 13 surface sediment samples from the Gomati River’s
flood plain in the Lucknow district were analyzed (Figure 2).