Assessing Soil Erosion-Susceptible Region of Forested Watershed Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)
摘要
The detachment and transfer of the topsoil from the ground by natural forces is known as soil erosion and is very complicated in the complex mountainous terrain of the Himalayas. In the identification of those regions, various decision-analysis techniques act as useful tools. The study focuses on mapping soil erosion-susceptible regions in the forest-imparted Kempty watershed of Mussoorie, Uttarakhand by prioritizing erosion-susceptible regions so that effective soil conservation measures might be put in place. For this purpose, various soil erosion contributing parameters, including slope, drainage density land use, soil, rainfall, and stream power index, were incorporated into the ArcGIS framework. Thematic layers pairwise comparison tool was utilized to develop erosion-susceptible regions utilizing the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) technique. Four sub-watersheds [SW] have been identified within the watershed, i.e., SWS1, SWS2, SWS3, and SWS4 using topographic maps. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to determine the weights of the parameters and assigned percentages viz. slope (40.90%), drainage network (26.13%), land use (13.57%), soil (9.97%), rainfall (6.01%), and stream power index (3.41%). Thus, high, moderate, and low erosion susceptibility were shown by the soil erosion map results. MCDA priority ranking depicted that SWS1 has a high erosion-susceptible region whereas SWS2 has a low susceptible region to soil erosion.