Morphometric analysis and prioritization of sub-watersheds in Jaisamand catchment using Geographical Information System

The drainage characteristics of the Jaisamand catchment have been studied using Survey of India's topographic sheets of 1: 50, 000 scales. The drainage pattern for delineated Jaisamand catchment was exported to ARC/GIS-10 software for morphometric analysis. The parameters computed by standard methods and formulae. The present study included computation of stream order, stream length, stream frequency, bifurcation ratio, drainage density, stream frequency, form factor, circulatory ratio, elongation ratio, relief ratio, ruggedness number etc. Then prioritization of different sub-basins for soil conservation measures was carried out. The total length of stream segments was maximum in first order streams and decreased as the stream order increased. The total stream length in the Jaisamand catchment was 7351.83 km. The values of the stream length ratio varied from 2.31 to 6.29 for the whole Jaisamand catchment. The average relief of the catchment was 413 m and it varied from 83 to 413 m in the sub-basins of the study area. The drainage density in the whole basin and sub-basins of the study area showed variation from 2.33 to1 1.50 km1 km−2 suggesting high drainage density.