Enhancing Watershed Management Through Advanced Geospatial and Morphometric Approaches for Wainganga River Basin, Central India

Effective river basin management with innovatory geospatial and morphometric techniques helps in comprehending flood mitigation, ecosystem conservation, and optimising land and water resource allocation. This chapter is a case study based on the Wainganga River basin, a northern sub-basin of the Godavari River in peninsular India. The present study deals with a newly developed erosivity risk index based on the combination of sub-basin areal morphometry and anthropogenic parameters like agricultural area and population density. The research utilises various open-access multi-resolution raster and vector datasets, which are integrated into the GIS platform to compute key sub-catchment morphometrics for 22 sub-basins. These parameters determine the basin’s hydrological response, sediment transport, and erosion dynamics. Subsequently, prioritisation is obtained based on average compound (Cp) scoring considering the areal morphometric data. Geostatistical computations, including principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering, showed first two components explained 90.56% of the dataset verifying the Cp score findings. LULC for the years 1985, 2005, and 2021 registered a rising dominance of farmlands and settlements followed by a major decline in forests and conversion of fallow lands for agriculture. The formulated erosivity risk index determined low to moderate soil erosion for all the sub-basins except for sub-basin 16, which exhibits an optimum index value of 1.00 due to high population density and cropping intensity. Hence, the chapter provides a lucid index for soil erosivity easily adoptable by policymakers and water resource managers enabling focused resource allocation and conservation efforts towards the most critical areas within a watershed.