Prioritization of subwatersheds in the Jajmau basin, Kanpur, via drainage morphometry

Advanced, reliable and cost-effective tools such as GIS and remote sensing play very important roles in prioritizing and extracting drainage in basins. In the present study, thirty-two morphometric aspects, including linear, aerial and relief parameters with standard formulae, are considered and computed to prioritize the sub watersheds. The toposheet (1:50000 scale) downloaded from the SOI and SRTM DEM (30 m resolution) from the Earth Explorer were used to extract drainage and delineate the watershed and sub watershed of the basin via ArcGIS 10.8 software (Spatial Analysis tools). The drainage of any region depends on topography, slope, hillshade, aspect, vegetation cover and many more. The results revealed that drainage is dentritic to sub-dentritic, which shows that the study area has homogenous i.e very gentle slope and uniform soil i.e alluvial soil throughout. The Jajmau Basin is divided into four sub watersheds and prioritized via the compound value and ranking methods. Sub watershed SW-1 needs high priority and immediate attention in terms of management aspects, whereas SW-4 needs the least attention. Hence, the prioritize watershed would be beneficial and attract decision makers, policy formers and management planners for the effective planning of resources at the parcel level in a more precise manner.