Introduction

The Himalayas, with mountainous landscape and depleting forest cover, has become a fragile ecosystem afflicted with the serious problem of soil erosion. As a result, rivers emerging out of the Himalayan region transport the sediment at a high rate. Garde and Kothyari (1987) reported that the rate of soil erosion in the Northern Himalayan region is high and can be of the order of 2000 to 2500 t km-2 yr-1. The middle mountains of the Northern Himalayas in Uttarakhand state are the most densely populated mountain areas in the world and population here is still increasing. This has resulted in large-scale depletion of resources and degradation of the environment. Natural disasters such as floods, drought, landslides, earthquakes and forest fires further degrade and deplete the natural resources base of this area.

Unless natural resources are allowed to regenerate at a pace that is balanced with their rate of consumption, they stand to lose in time and space. The widely accepted strategy for the protection and conservation of natural resources has always been sustainable natural resources utilisation and conservation planning. Thus, the knowledge of distribution of soil erosion in an area is of paramount importance in planning appropriate conservation measures depending upon the degree of severity.

Therefore, an attempt has been made to assess the hazards of soil erosion for suggesting soil conservative measures in middle Himalayan watershed of Khulgad. For this purpose, we have utilised the capabilities of satellite remote sensing (RS) and GIS to generate, manipulate and spatially organise disparate data and provide distributed information about input variables for soil erosion modelling using the Morgan-Morgan-Finney (MMF) mathematical model.

The study reported herein was undertaken in the BIO-GEO Database and Ecological Modelling (BIO GEO DEM) Programme of Natural Resources Data Management Systems (NRDMS) Division, DST. The outputs derived through the present study shall help in prevention of further degradation of important natural resources in the middle Himalayan region in general and the Khulgad watershed in particular.