Watersheds Characteristics and Prioritization Using Morphometric Parameters and Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchal Process (FAHP): A Part of Lower Subansiri Sub-Basin

Abstract

Globally, the study of watersheds plays an important role for any kind of developmental activities and sustainable management. The present study lies in tectonically active regions of Northeast India, which needs to be given proper consideration prior to taking up any kind of developmental activity. The main objective of the research is to understand the behaviors of the watersheds in response to the neo-tectonic and to prioritize the watersheds using morphometric parameters and fuzzy-AHP. For the present studies, nine watersheds have been extracted from the Cartosat DEM using ArcGIS 10 software. Sixteen morphometric parameters indicating neo-tectonic domain have been considered for the study of prioritization of the watersheds. Firstly, the deviation of linear regression in Horton’s law of drainage order and drainage length has been discussed which indicates that all the watersheds are influenced by endogenic force, which induces the changes of the landform. Based on the FAHP weighted value, the prioritization of watershed is classified into five classes, namely very low (< 0.044), low (0.0466–0.0645), medium (0.0645–0.1112), high (0.1112–0.1818), and very high (0.1818–0.2691). The watersheds A and D are assigned to highest rank as they were within the 0.182 and 0.270 weighted values. And watershed E is lowest among the nine watersheds with weighted value of < 0.044, respectively. Finally, Kappa method has been used to validate the results and observed that 47% and 30% of the collected data fall within very high and high prioritization zones.