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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Claire Walsh
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Copyright © 2024 by the author(s). In many developing countries with poorly managed landscapes, soil erosion threatens the sustainability of water bodies. The main limitations of this study are the lack of daily sediment data, lithology, higher-resolution DEM data, and socioeconomic factors. Poor land use policy and resource management in the Upper Awash Sub-basin lead to soil erosion and sedimentation of hydrological infrastructure, Effective watershed prioritization requires integrating land use, hydrology, sediment load, and morphometric factors but often faces gaps, especially in the study area. This research aims to prioritise the Upper Awash Sub-Basin by its morphometric, land use and cover (LULC), and sediment yield characteristics. We used the integrated AHP-VIKOR multi-attribute decision-making method to prioritise watersheds, incorporating morphometry, LULC, and sediment load attributes in the simple matrix approach. The findings showed the following classes of erosion: exceedingly high (2722.14 km2), high (2524.46 km2), moderate (2205.48 km2), low (1611.43 km2), and extremely low (854.35 km2). Sub-watersheds WS6, WS8, WS10, WS13, and WS24 are the top priority for watershed management. The study ranked watersheds based on various attributes but encountered limitations such as the lack of daily sediment data, geological structure, and lithology. It can be concluded that this approach is very important to identify and categorize hotspots of soil erosion sub-watersheds for planners and decision-makers for conserving water and soil and for different environmental management purposes.
Author(s): Assegide E, Alamirew T, Walsh CL, Zeleke G
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Environmental and Earth Sciences
Year: 2025
Volume: 7
Issue: 1
Pages: 167-195
Print publication date: 01/01/2025
Online publication date: 25/11/2024
Acceptance date: 19/09/2024
Date deposited: 09/12/2024
ISSN (electronic): 2661-3190
Publisher: Bilingual Publishing Group
URL: https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v7i1.6887
DOI: 10.30564/jees.v7i1.6887
Data Access Statement: The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article; further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
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