Abstract
Micro-watershed planning and management play an important role in addressing the issues and challenges of water scarcity of a region. The assessment of hydrological framework using morphometric calculation and GIS technology is a recognized tool for carrying out planning activities for the watershed. The uncertainties associated with the earlier work of watershed prioritization can be easily addressed with new emerging geospatial-statistical correlation techniques. A sum weightages methodology is applied on the upper watershed of river Subarnarekha in the state of Jharkhand, India, for identification of critical subwatershed, a priority level ranking and zonation mapping of each individual subwatershed is developed using the morphometric calculation coupled with GIS tools. This approach helps in identification and bifurcation of subwatershed with three level of priority, i.e, Low, Medium, High. The result reveals that 5.8 % of subwatershed lies in high priority zone that signifies the area as critical and susceptible zones of soil erosion, which requires immediate attention from planners and policymakers. The high-level priority region should be considered for soil, water, and land conservation work. This approach of prioritization techniques can further be extended to another critical watershed of India for better decision support system and planning.
Highlights
Watershed rejuvenation and development is an integrated approach to maintain ecological balance
Computer modeling of a watershed coupled with statistics, remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) proved to be effective and efficient tools to address the issue of demand and supply
GIS-based tools facilitate the analysis of various geomorphological parameters of the drainage basin like the lithology, surface run off potential, infiltration capacity, etc
Summary
Watershed rejuvenation and development is an integrated approach to maintain ecological balance. The management of water resource can be done using watershed prioritization techniques, an approach that is helpful in soil conservation, barren land rejuvenation, and rural employment generation. In India, extensive research regarding the morphometric analysis of river basin has been carried at various levels for resource planning and watershed management. Groundwater recharge potential zones mapping in upper Manimuktha Sub-basin, Vellar river Tamil Nadu India is obtained using GIS and remote sensing techniques [13]. The compound parameter calculation and ranking method is a common method used in watershed prioritization In this method, the entire morphometric variables are assigned equal weightages. Assigning equal weightages may create a significant level of variation on the results To overcome this level of variation, a statistical approach, WSA (Weighted Sum Analysis) [16] a correlation technique is used for ranking and prioritization of each subwatershed. The impact of morphometric input variables is considered individually to determine which parameter should be considered in the final combination for rank allocation
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