Quantification of morphometric characterization and prioritization for management planning in semi-arid tropics of India: A remote sensing and GIS approach

•Prior watershed prioritization techniques are cumbersome for data scarcity regions.•Past efforts for watershed planning treated various morphometric variables equally.•Removal of individual biasness of morphometric parameters leads in precise ranking.•Novel Weighted Sum Analysis technique was proposed for prioritization of watershed.•Geospatial tools were coupled with statistical method to demonstrate the technique. Planning of watershed at micro-level is indispensable for sustainable development, particularly in the fragile semi-arid tropics. Morphometric characterization is important to recognize hydrological behavior of the basin for carrying out management strategies. Previous prioritization methods suffer from cavities in which uncertainties were associated with morphometric variables of watershed ecosystem. Keeping this in view, geospatial–statistical techniques were used for identifying critical and priority sub-watersheds in water scarce region of India. A novel Weighted Sum Analysis (WSA) technique was developed for ranking of each hydrological unit concerning the weightages obtained from morphometric parameters. Considering WSA approach, sub-watersheds were alienated into very high, high, medium, low and poor priority zones. The results illustrate that 51.66% of sub-watersheds are in the moderately to highly susceptible zones, which shows potential areas for preferential conservation works planning. The WSA is viable approach and will be useful to different stakeholders such as agriculturists and natural resources managers for better decisions making.