Abstract
Soil erosion is a serious environmental threat amongst the prevailing major natural hazards which affects the livelihood of millions of people around the world. The deterioration of nutrient-rich topsoil can affect the sustainability of agriculture and various ecosystems by decreasing soil productivity. Conservation measures should be implemented in those regions which are critical to soil erosion. The identification of areas susceptible to soil erosion through prioritization of watershed can help in proper planning and implementation of suitable conservational measures. Therefore, in this study, the prioritization of 23 micro-watersheds present in the Dnyanganga watershed of Tapti River basin is carried out based on morphometric parameters and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). TanDEM-X 90m openly accessible DEM generated from SAR interferometry, obtained through DLR, is used for determining the morphometric parameters. These parameters are grouped into linear, areal and relief aspects. Initially, the relative weights of various morphometric parameters used in TOPSIS were determined using Saaty’s Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Thereafter, the MCDM package in R software was utilized to implement TOPSIS. The micro-watersheds were classified into very high (0.459–0.357), high (0.326–0.240), moderate (0.213–0.098), and low (0.096–0.088) prioritization levels based on the TOPSIS highest closeness (Ci+) to ideal solution. It is evident from the results that micro-watersheds (MW10, MW18, MW19, MW2, MW11, and MW17) are highly susceptible to soil erosion and thus, conservation measures can be carried out in these micro-watersheds with the priority to ensure the sustainability of future agriculture by preventing excessive soil loss through erosion.
Highlights
Soil erosion has been considered as one of the serious natural hazards which affects the sustainable development of a watershed worldwide in case of agriculture and natural resources management [1,2,3]
The prioritization of 23 micro-watersheds present in the Dnyanganga watershed of Tapti River basin was carried out in order to identify the erosion prone micro-watersheds based on the morphometric parameters through Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method using R
The present study utilizes eight morphometric parameters for the prioritization of Dnyanganga micro-watershed using the TOPSIS MCDM approach performed through R statistical software
Summary
Soil erosion has been considered as one of the serious natural hazards which affects the sustainable development of a watershed worldwide in case of agriculture and natural resources management [1,2,3]. Accelerated erosion in a watershed can be slowed down by identifying and prioritizing regions sensitive to soil erosion [4]. Morphometric analysis aids in the identification of sensitive regions which are vulnerable to soil erosion as the linear and shape parameters have a direct. There have been various studies which utilize morphometric parameters for the prioritization of watershed especially using MCDM [6,7,8,9]. The prioritization of 23 micro-watersheds present in the Dnyanganga watershed of Tapti River basin was carried out in order to identify the erosion prone micro-watersheds based on the morphometric parameters through Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method using R.
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