Delineation of potential water harvesting site for agriculture water planning in Betwa basin of India using geospatial and analytical hierarchical process technique

Abstract

World is facing acute water scarcity owing to growing freshwater demand, rainfall aberrations and miserable management of water resources. Selection of site for water harvesting structure is crucial for water management in basin. SWAT and AHP techniques applied for decision making at HRU level. AHP technique was used for delineation of sites using soil type, slope, runoff ratio and land use land cover criteria. Model R² ranged from 0.85 to 0.92, NSE ranged from 0.85 to 0.92, RSR ranged from 0.28 to 0.38 and PBIAS ranged from −14.68 to 0.79 for calibration while R² ranged from 0.68 to 0.80, NSE ranged from 0.70 to 0.81, RSR ranged from 0.30 to 0.40 and PBIAS ranged from −12.7 to 0.57 for validation. upper region of basin has the highest potential of water harvesting, which can be managed efficiently by specific water harvesting structure. The tools and techniques can be adopted worldwide, for water resource planning at HRU level.

Keywords:

• Hydrological response units
• surface runoff
• water conservation
• SWAT model
• Betwa river basin

Acknowledgements

The authors thankfully acknowledge all the support provided by the Division of Agricultural Engineering, ICAR-IARI, New Delhi. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions that helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statements

Some or all data, models or code generated or used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may only be provided with restrictions.