Assessing erosion prone areas in a watershed using interval rough-analytical hierarchy process (IR-AHP) and fuzzy logic (FL)

Abstract

Soil erosion is one of the major land loss problems in agricultural land and is regarded as a serious environmental hazard worldwide. This study focused on watershed prioritization using morphometric parameters using Fuzzy Logic (FL), Interval Rough-Analytical Hierarchy Process (IR-AHP) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) integration for Gusru Watershed, India. Fourteen morphometric parameters, including circulatory ratio (Rc), form factor (Rf), elongation ratio (Re), compactness coefficient (Cc), drainage density (Dd), stream frequency (Fs), texture ratio (T), relief ratio (Rh), relative relief (Rr), ruggedness number (RN), bifurcation ratio (Rb), average slope (Sa), length of overland flow (Lo), and hypsometric integral (HI) were evaluated to determine the erosion susceptibility. Each morphometric parameter was assigned a weight value by the FL and IR-AHP methods, and mapping and analysis were then carried out in the GIS environment. Our results showed that the sub-watersheds (SW) 9, 2, and 11 were most susceptible to soil erosion and the sub-watershed 1 was the least from the viewpoint of soil erosion ranking.