Hydrological response-based watershed prioritization in semiarid, basaltic region of western India using frequency ratio, fuzzy logic and AHP method

Abstract

Watersheds from semiarid regions are more sensitive to hydrological processes and sustainability of water resources than humid regions. Hence, it is indispensable to determine the response of watersheds to hydrological processes for water resource management. Thus, the hydrological response-based watershed prioritization study has been undertaken for eight sub-watersheds from semiarid, basaltic region of Western Ghats of India. Intent to this, a novel index has been parameterized using thematic layers such as drainage density, geology, soil, slope, landform classification, land use/land cover, rainfall and runoff (DGSLR). This study evaluates the performance of DGSLR index using three models, namely analytical hierarchy process (AHP), frequency ratio (FR) and fuzzy logic for sub-watershed-wise prioritization. The FR ratio showed the highest value for very high drainage density (8.73) indicating most probability for a high hydrological response. According to AHP weight, most influencing factors to hydrological processes are precipitation (25%), slope (19%) and land use/land cover (14%) followed by landform classification (11%). These three methods are prioritized study area into four classes, i.e., very high, high, moderate and low using area-weighted average method. These models showed that very high-priority area lies near the outlet of the watershed as well as the upper part

Identification of erosion-prone areas using modified morphometric prioritization method and sediment production rate: a remote sensing and GIS approach

“…Higher value of drainage texture for sub-watershed 1 depicts thin soil cover, steep to moderate land slope, poor vegetation cover and presence of hard rock, in contrast with sub-watershed 10 and 11 where Shivganga watershed has low value of drainage texture. The above values also suggest low to moderate permeability of basalt generating higher surface runoff (Kadam et al 2017(Kadam et al , 2018. Horton in 1945 recognized infiltration capacity as the single important factor which influences drainage texture.…”

Assessment of recharge potential zones for groundwater development and management using geospatial and MCDA technologies in semiarid region of Western India

“…Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method such as AHP is used to delimit the weightage of feature layer to eliminate the biasness in the output map. Based on MCDA analysis, resultant weightage was given to the thematic layer and suitable ranking was allotted to each class of respective theme [24,25]. The rank was assigned in the scale of 1-5, where 5 represents the good recharge potential, while the 1 represents poor recharge potential.…”

“…Shivganga River originates at Sinhagad fort foothills and further confluence with Gunjawani River near Mohari Budrukh village. The high elevation patch is situated in western part (1264 m) and lower elevation (590 m) is in easternmost portion of region [24,25].…”

Land Suitability Analysis for Afforestation in Semi-arid Watershed of Western Ghat, India: A Groundwater Recharge Perspective

“…It is covering an area of about 17600 ha present in the eastern undulating part of the Western Ghats (Figure 1). The study area experiences innumerable problems such as soil deprivation, water scarcity, deforestation and soil pollution (A. K. Kadam et al, 2018;A. Kadam et al, 2019), groundwater quality depletion (A.…”

“…Multi-criteria land suitability has been widely used for identification of potential parcels for agriculture (R. B. , plantation (Bhagat, 2009;R.B. Zolekar & Bhagat, 2014), watershed management (Gaikwad & Bhagat, 2018, A. K. Kadam et al, 2018A. Kadam et al, 2019;Rajasekhar et al, 2020), settlements, development projects, industries, etc.…”