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

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 (R-c), form factor (R-f), elongation ratio (R-e), compactness coefficient (C-c), drainage density (D-d), stream frequency (F-s), texture ratio (T), relief ratio (R-h), relative relief (R-r), ruggedness number (R-N), bifurcation ratio (R-b), average slope (S-a), length of overland flow (L-o), 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.