COMPREHENSIVE WATERSHED MANAGEMENT

A CASE STUDY WITH TWIN WATERSHEDS

Presented By
INDRADIP MITRA. PGBSC(Apllied) GIS & REMOTE SENSING

STUDY AREA :--

BANKURA DISTRICT, WEST BENGAL

AUTHORS :-D.K.PAL, D.CHAKRABORTY, R.K.DAS, A.MONDAL, S.SENGUPTA AND B.DUTTA.

What is Watershed Management

???

Lets Find Out

 It is defined as the land area from which

water drains to a given point. In other words watershed is an area from which runoff, resulting from precipitation, flows past a single point into a stream. Since water is drained off to a given point, the management of watershed in point of view of Hydrology is easily possible. Hence, we can arrive to another definition of watershed i.e. "watershed is a manageable Hydrological Unit".

Abstract : --

The study deals with

Comprehensive Watershed Management with the aid of semi detail deliberation of soil resource and land use / land cover over an area. The study aims at

 1. Inventing soil resources which

are one of the most crutial life supporting entities for a watershed. 2. Deriving the level of relative wisdom in the status of land utilization in the watersheds.

River :- Silai

River Silai, Garhbeta, West Bengal

 In a nutshell efforts were LISS II

were used for the study area. Two small watersheds namely Silai (Silavati) Upper and Silai (Silavati) Lower were chosen as study area. Each occupies an area of 28775 ha and 32319 ha respectively. The five category segmentation of watersheds on sustainable utilization of soils revealed a very encouraging trend for Silai Lower.

Contd.

The other watershed Silai upper

showed a mixed trend but the category. i.e. very good use portion had a marked rise for both the watersheds as time progressed. On the whole the results demonstrated that with the passage of time there has been an overall change for the better land utilization.

Data used --

IRS 1A / 1B LIS II data used.

Methodology : --

Land use / land cover

mapping of soil resources analysis of soilscape vis a vis current land use, GIS slw technology used.

Conclusion : - In order to achieve comprehensive

watershed management efforts are made throughout the course to generate the necessary scientific inputs towards optimum developments of watersheds Remote Sensing has been used as a tool to generates these inputs that can be used by the watershed manager for sustainable development of watershed.

At last we can say that

 Thus we find that GIS & Remote

Sensing can be very efficient tool in the process of watershed management. The advantages of GIS & Remote Sensing are the fact that they are less time consuming and provide accurate results. However the high cost of the typical GIS softwares like Arc GIS and ERDAS and the satellite data have limited their use in the low funded project.

Thank You