Application of remote sensing and GIS technology for identification and development of management scenario of critical agricultural watershed

Abstract

Management of watershed encompasses various activities from watershed delineation to monitoring. The suitability of land for development is not only based on a set of physical parameters (geography/ terrain, soils, slopes etc.) of the land but also very much on the economic factors. The cumulative effect of these factors determine the degree of suitability and also helps in further categorization of land into different priority orders for development. The development of new advanced techniques in Spatial Information such as remote sensing and GIS are effectively used for the extraction of information about spatial features. DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is one of the important sources in extraction of drainage network and is useful for determining the quantitative description of catchment geometry i.e. morphometric analysis. Morphometric analysis has been commonly applied to prioritization of watersheds. In this study, the morphometric analysis and prioritization of seventeen Sub-watersheds of Maniari watershed, situated in Lormi block of Mungeli District Chhattisgarh State, India, was studied. For prioritization of sub-watersheds, morphometric analysis was utilized by using the Linear parameters such as Stream order, Stream length, Stream length ratio, Basin length, Bifurcation ratio (2.33 to 4.81), Drainage density (1.04 to 4.35), Stream frequency (0.17 to 6.69), Texture ratio (0.19 to 13.44), Length of overland flow (0.52 to 2.27 ) and Shape parameters such as Form factor (0.31 to 0.35), Shape factor (2.84 to 3.27), Circulatory ratio, Elongation ratio (0.62 to 0.67), and Compactness constant (1.20 to 2.33). The different prioritization ranks are assigned after evaluation of the compound factor. It was considered as high priority for adopting conservation measure as well. The suitable locations for conservation measure structures in highly prioritized sub-watersheds were also identified for the appropriate land and water management plane. The relevance of work shows the appropriate measure structure locations for preventing the soil from getting eroded from the highly prioritized sub-watershed.