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Soil Loss Estimation for Sustainable Watershed Conservation in Semi-arid Bengal Basin

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Advances in Water Resources Management for Sustainable Use

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering ((LNCE,volume 131))

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Abstract

Soil loss is one of the major distress in any watershed where natural agents and anthropogenic activities predominate. Quantitative evaluation of soil loss is a prerequisite for proper planning and effective conservation of watershed or basin. Nowadays various approaches of modelling techniques help to estimate soil loss under a wide range of conditions. An ungauged river basin with a lot of bare land and dry fallows makes it important to carve out the information related to its intensity and magnitude towards soil erosion. In this study Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation Integrated with remote sensing and Geographical Information System has been utilized to estimate the soil loss in Shilabati river basin located in the south eastern part of West Bengal, India. The basin is immensely criss-crossed by numerous rills and gullies at the middle stretch and has a total area of 3881 km2. Total estimated soil loss from the basin ranged from 40.079 to 677.93 t/ha/year. For the estimation of its erosion efficiency Sediment Delivery Ratio from a number of empirical equations has also been calculated. The basin has been divided into 23 sub-basins and prioritization rank has been assigned applying Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution model including the morphometric attributes and Sediment Delivery Ratio values. Sub-basin number 1, 2, 3, 5, 16, 18, 20 and 7 has been incurring the highest loss and should be under foremost conservation measure.

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Acknowledgements

The authors show deep gratitude to the Survey of India (SOI) for providing the topographical sheets of the study area. The authors acknowledge the Digital Library of School of Water Resources Engineering, Jadavpur University for allowing to access all the GIS and statistical-based software. Lastly, the authors acknowledge the team members for conducting a field survey for thorough visualization of the soil erosion zones.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Water Resources Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 700032, India

    Sudipa Halder, Shuvoshri Bhattacharya, Souvik Mondal & Pankaj Kumar Roy

  2. Department of Geography, Women’s College, Calcutta, Kolkata, 700003, India

    Malabika Biswas Roy

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  1. Sudipa Halder
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Correspondence to Malabika Biswas Roy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Water Resources Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

    Pankaj Kumar Roy

  2. Department of Geography, Women's College, Calcutta, Kolkata, India

    Malabika Biswas Roy

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Durgapu, Durgapur, West Bengal, India

    Supriya Pal

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Halder, S., Roy, M.B., Bhattacharya, S., Mondal, S., Roy, P.K. (2021). Soil Loss Estimation for Sustainable Watershed Conservation in Semi-arid Bengal Basin. In: Roy, P.K., Roy, M.B., Pal, S. (eds) Advances in Water Resources Management for Sustainable Use. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 131. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6412-7_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6412-7_31

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