Comparative Analysis of MCDA Techniques for Identifying Erosion-Prone Areas in the Burhanpur Watershed in Central India for the Purposes of Sustainable Watershed Management
2023
Abhishek Patel | K. V. Ramana Rao | Yogesh A. Rajwade | Chandra Kant Saxena | Karan Singh | Ankur Srivastava
The degradation of land and increasing water scarcity are existing challenges for agricultural sustainability, necessitating the implementation of improved soil-conservation practices at the watershed scale. The identification and selection of critical/prone areas based on erosion-governing criteria is essential and helps in the execution of the management process for determining priority. This study prioritizes erosion-prone sub-watersheds (alternatives) based on morphometric parameters (multiple criteria) via five Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approaches, i.e., AHP: Analytical Hierarchy Process: TOPSIS: Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution: VIKOR: VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje: SAW: Simple Additive Weighting: and CF: Compound Factor. Based on their priority score, 19 sub-watersheds were classified into four priority classes: low priority (0&ndash:0.25), moderate priority (0.25&ndash:0.50), high priority (0.50&ndash:0.75), and very high priority (0.75&ndash:1). The results revealed that about 8.34&ndash:30.15% area of the Burhanpur watershed is critically prone to erosion, followed by 23.38&ndash:52.05% area classed as high priority, 7.47&ndash:49.99% area classed as moderate priority, and 10.33&ndash:18.28% area classed as low priority. Additionally, four indices&mdash:percentage of changes (∆:P), intensity of changes (∆:I), the Spearman rank correlation coefficient test (SCCT), and the Kendall tau correlation coefficient test (KTCCT)&mdash:were employed to compare the models. This study confirms the efficacy of morphometric parameters for prioritizing sub-watersheds to preserve soil and the environment, particularly in areas for which limited information is available.
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