To optimize the use of available land area and to meet the multiple demands of food and forest cover, planning and process use a series of cooperative, iterative steps to characterize existing conditions, identify and prioritize problems of land and water resources, define management objectives, and develop and implement protection or remediation strategies as necessary through watershed development-based programs. A watershed plan is a strategy and a work plan for achieving water resource goals that provide assessment and management information for a geographically defined watershed. Remote sensing and GIS, which plays an important role in detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of watershed area by reflected and emitted radiation, is also efficiently used for watershed management. In the present study an attempt has been made to study the extensive use of GIS in watershed management. For this purpose, Khajuri Watershed is selected which is situated at the border of Marihan block. The study area is almost fully covered by metamorphic rocks, which include different limestone, gneiss and sandstone. The area’s topography is generally mountainous and rugged dissected by many distributaries of Khajuri river. The catchment covers an area of about 126 km 2 (30,000 acres or 12,600 ha). Three commercially available GIS software tools are used in this project, which are ARCMAP v 8.1, ArcView and ERDAS IMAGINE v 8.5. ARCMAP is used as a tool to create and manage geographic information, and ArcView is used as a tool to visualize, explore, query, interpolate, update and analyze geographic information. As the total area is very large, it is sub-divided into sub-watersheds and micro watersheds to determine the available water resources of the study area, current water demand and future projection and technological options for water resource management and, in turn, to improve water availability and management of crop yield of a watershed, largely for optimum utilization of water resources to derive maximum benefits.
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