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Flood hazard causes great loss to lives and properties leading to disturbance in human society. Flood is the single most hydrometeorological hazard causing substantial losses. To gain better understanding of the flood phenomena especially for planning and mitigation purposes, flood risk analysis is often required. For the present study, the middle part of Panchganga river of Kolhapur district, Maharashtra was selected. The main objective of the present study was to evaluate the potential flood risk areas of Panchganga river using GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis. The flood scenario across the Panchganga river was analysed using RADARSAT SAR data of 5 August 2005. To remove the speckle of SAR image, a median filtered technique was used. Thresholding technique was applied on RADARSAT SAR data to segregate flooded areas from non-flooded areas. Factors considered for evaluation of the flood risk analysis were flood layer, elevation, infrastructure and land use/ land cover analysis. The spatial multicriteria analysis with ranking, rating and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method was used to compute the priority weights of each criterion. Accuracy assessment reveals that AHP is the most accurate technique to assess flood risk of Panchganga river.

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The forest fire management starts with identifying fire potential areas. This study suggests a new approach based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS), and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to map forest fire susceptibility of Chandoli National Park of Maharashtra. Influencing factors like past burnt area, Land Surface Temperature (LST), forest type, agriculture area, road network, and the vicinity of settlements taken into consideration. All variables assigned a weight based on their impact on the fire susceptibility. The final map categorized, ranging from very high to very low, into five fire susceptible regions. The result indicated that 12.99% (6506.89 ha) land area of the study region came in a very high susceptible region, while 18.70% (9361.10 ha) of high. The forest fire susceptibility map shows that 12.26%, 44.42%, 11.61% area comes under moderate, low, and very low- susceptible areas, respectively. Afterward, an accuracy assessment carried out with existing records of the forest fire. The mostly very high and high susceptible forest fire region comes where high road density, settlements and agriculture fields dominate. The result reveals that the anthropogenic factors and its activities in the forest region responsible for the frequent forest fire. The unification of remote sensing and the Analytical Hierarchy Process into GIS is beneficial to determining forested areas with high fire susceptibility and also to plan forest management after a forest fire.

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