Productivity Improvement of Wasteland in Drought-Prone, Overdrafted and Rocky Terrain Watershed: A Case Study of Upper T
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Productivity Improvement of Wasteland in Drought-Prone, Overdrafted and Rocky Terrain Watershed: A Case Study of Upper Thurinjalar Watershed in Ponnaiyar Basin Tamil Nadu, India K. Santhanam1 • Marykutty Abraham1 • Anoop Kumar Mishra1
Received: 1 September 2018 / Revised: 7 October 2018 / Accepted: 9 January 2020 The National Academy of Sciences, India 2020
Abstract A great extent of productive land has become wasteland due to climatic change, frequent monsoon failure and inadequate water supply for irrigation. Identification of such lands can be helpful for conversion into productive land. Present study focuses on identification of wasteland in the watershed by utilising land use map of 2018 by interpreting satellite image of IRS-P6 LISS IV over upper Thurinjalar watershed in Thiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu. For this purpose, digital image processing software ERDAS IMAGINE 2015 and GIS Software ArcGIS 10.5 version were used. Fifty percentage of the total geographical area of the watershed is reported as wasteland in our study. Favourable wasteland layer was superimposed upon the administrative village boundary map by GIS overlay analysis. Type of wasteland was demarcated using remote sensing and GIS techniques, and thematic layers such as lineament map, geomorphology map and depth to bedrock map were generated. Through GIS overlay analysis, wasteland map of the study area was overlaid on the three thematic layers and favourable artificial recharge sites were identified. In upper Thurinjalar watershed, 61.06 km2 is highly favourable and 214.18 km2 is moderately favourable for recharge, and the sites are recommended for groundwater recharge using structures such as pits, percolation ponds, borewells and check dams. Among wastelands, degraded lands under plantation, lands with scrub and lands without scrub were prioritised for groundwater recharge. Technique adopted in our study can be applied
& Anoop Kumar Mishra [email protected] 1
Centre for Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
over other watersheds and wasteland to convert them into productive land. Keywords Land use Remote sensing GIS Overlay analysis Wasteland Recharge
Wasteland is described as degraded land which is currently underutilised and is deteriorating due to lack of soil and water management or on account of natural causes which can be brought under vegetative cover with reasonable effort. Wastelands can also result from inherent disabilities such as location, environment, chemical and physical properties of the soil. The development of wasteland is taking a good shape in the country and catching eyes of many entrepreneurs to get involved in a very big way. Wasteland occupies 14.61% of total geographical area of India [1]. 13.75% of total geographical area of Tamil Nadu state is occupied by wasteland which acutely faces challenges of water scarcity [1]. The study area Upper Thurinjalar watershed composed of hardrocks is one among 104
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