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).