Watershed prioritization of Kosi watershed based on the morphometric and land use and land cover analysis
Loading...
Date
2022-03
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, District Udham Singh Nagar, Uttarakhand. PIN - 263145
Abstract
Watershed prioritization has gained importance in natural resource management,
especially watershed management. Kosi watershed is a constituent of the Kosi river, and it falls
within the Almora and Nainital districts of the Uttarakhand, covering an 1819 km2 area. Using
remote sensing and GIS application, prioritization of Kosi sub-watersheds have been done
based on different morphological attribute lineage with soil erodibility and land use and land
cover analysis. Prioritization has been performed to identify environmental stress areas. ArcGis
10.4.1 has been utilized for watershed delineation, morphometric analysis, and LULC
supervised classification. The Kosi watershed is further delineated into 17 sub-watersheds for
prioritization purposes. Various morphometric parameters (linear, areal, and relief) have been
determined for each sub-watershed. Nine morphometric parameters has been selected for
pairwise comparison matrix for prioritization based on the FAHP technique then suitable
weights are assigned to the morphometric parameters.
Further, these weights has normalized to assign final ranks to the sub-watersheds. Subwatersheds
have been classified into five categories: very low, low, moderate, high, and very
high. . In FAHP technique only Sub-watersheds SW1 and SW3 are found very high priority,
whereas sub-watersheds SW8 and SW11 comes under very less priority. Land use and land
cover mapping have been carried out with the help of Landsat 8 LISS III level II data with an
overall accuracy of 84.98 % and a kappa coefficient of 0.81. Kosi watershed is classified into
six classes forest, wasteland, waterbody, cultivated land, rocks and built-up area. Three classes
wasteland, cultivated land, forest area are considered for prioritization, an average of the
individual rank are determined for the final ranking of the sub-watersheds. Based on LULC
sub-watersheds SW3, SW6 and SW9 comes under very high priority, and sub-watersheds
SW14 and SW17 comes under very less priority.