Environmental And Watershed Degradation Factors Influencing Afara And Umudere Rivers In Umuahia, Abia State, Nigeria.

ABSTRACT

 A bi-weekly study to determine the environmental and watershed degradation factors influencing Afara and Umudere rivers were carried out between June to November 2002 A 6 X 4 factorial experiment in a randomized complete block design with three replications was used to assess the relationship between the physico-chemical characteristics (temperature, pH, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), free carbondioxide (CO2), and total hardness) of water samples at four locations — Golden Guinea wastewater, Umuahia sewerage wastewater, Alhra river and Uinudeic river respectively. Structured questionnaires were administered to the inhabitants of the three villages that own Alara river watershed this was analyzed using a multiple regression analysis to determine the level of degradation and lhctors affecting the management of the watershed resources with six hypotheses postulated from priori knowledge. This showed that adoption of conservation measures, income level, security of tenure, family size, and fallow period conformed to the priori expectations/hypotheses and three out of the seven independent variables were significant