AN EXPERT SYSTEM FOR WATERSHED MANAGEMENT

Abstract

To increase agricultural production, reduce flood hazards and siltation problem etc., at the National level an integrated approach on watershed basis is now being considered very essentially. As a first step in watershed management, general description of watershed, detailed inventories of natural resources and socioeconomic features are to be made to analyze the problems and potentialities of the site. Afterwards an attempt has to be made to describe the detailed landuse pattern. Depending on the land capability classification, problems and needs of area under watershed suitable soil and water conservation measures are applied to watershed. Being a treatment and diagnosis type problem, watershed management is not amenable to conventional programming because it has no algorithmic procedure. An expert system can attempt to capture this wide body of expert knowledge and can give assistance to the experts and planners in the field of watershed management. This dissertation presents the problem of design, development and implementation of EXPSHED — an expert system for watershed management. The expert system is developed using an expert system shell EXSYS and runs on personnel computers. This expert system consists of 364 rules. This expert system has three modes namely Land Capability Classification mode, Soil and Water Conservation Measures mode and Repair and Maintenance mode.