Prioritization of tirthan watershed

The present study seeks to prioritize the Tirthan watershed for conservation and management of natural resources on the basis of morphological and land use/land cover characteristics. The study has utilized morphometric information derived from drainage layers computed from toposheets. The relief, slope, aspect and hypsometric parameters have been analysed using ASTER Digital Elevation Model (DEM) with 30 m spatial resolution. To generate the land use/ land cover information, the Google Earth images have been used. The characterization and prioritization of each sub-watershed has been done using 21 parameters related to morphometry and land use/ land cover. For the final prioritization, the arbitrary weightage method has been adopted to assign weight to the parameters on the basis of their resource degradation potential. Based on composite scores of parameters used the sub-watersheds have been ranked and ordered. Results of the study reveals that TSW-1 and TSW-2 fall in critical category of watershed prioritization.