Abstract:
Decreasing water resources is one of the main concerns throughout the world and
specially in Pakistan. South Waziristan, district of Pakistan is facing severe water shortage
from the past few decades. The best way to control scarcity of water resources is construction
of water harvesting structure at a suitable location, which need very critical measure
considering many criteria for the selection of sites for harvesting structure. Using GIS and
remote sensing we can select optimal sites for check dam very efficiently and effectively. In
this study we adopted GIS and Multicriteria decision analysis using Analytical Hierarchy
Process and Weighted Linear Combination for locating appropriate locations for water
harvesting check dam in WANA city of district South Waziristan Pakistan. Various confined
layers i.e. Land Cover, Soil, Slope, Precipitation, Geology, Drainage density, fault line and
road networks were created and then assigned weight to each layer according to their
importance for check dam and apply Analytical Hierarchy Process and Weighted Linear
Combination for finding a suitable zone for check dam first. The AHP method give us
significant results than WLC, while validating with existing check dam sites of the study
area. Analytical hierarchy process gives us result ranging from high potential to low potential
zone which was classified into three zones i.e., low potential zone, moderate potential zone
and high potential zones. Out of a total area of 3742 sq.km, high potential zones occupy 805
km2
(21.24%), moderate potential zones occupy 1697 km2
(45.35%), and poor potential
zones occupy 1240 km2
(33.13%). After selecting suitable zones, sites for check dam was
marked by using stream order which was created from DEM using ArcMap. 2
nd and higher
stream order was chosen for check dam. Out of the suitable zones a total 28 suitable sites for check dam were marked by physical visits to the study area and using google earth pro in high suitability and moderate suitability zones.
