SHILLONG: Deputy Chief Minister and Incharge Soil and Water Conservation, Rowell Lyngdoh on Thursday released the Watershed Atlas of Meghalaya at the Annual Officers’ Conference here on Thursday.
The Watershed Atlas has been prepared by the Soil and Water Conservation Department in collaboration with the North Eastern Space Application Centre (NESAC).
The department published the Watershed Atlas where all the watersheds in Meghalaya are delineated and coded by following the Alpha Numeric System according to National Standard Watershed Atlas of India.
The Watershed Atlas indicates a detailed report on the absolute extent of the micro-watersheds, mini-watersheds and their linkage to the sub-catchment, catchment and basins of the state.
Watershed Atlas will facilitate proper planning and prioritization of Watershed Project and avoid duplication, adding it will also give information of location of villages, roads, school and hospitals and can be superimposed on the Atlas from a map of any scale by geo-referencing and can be reproduced to any desired scale as per requirement of the end user.
The Atlas is a base line data on which a data bank can be built and generated for each micro-watershed such as erosion index, soil data, land-use -land-cover and meteorological data.
Once these data are entered, the information for any watershed can be retrieved at the click of a button.
The Atlas provides a precise and comprehensive database for developing appropriate strategies for watershed development projects in the spheres of agriculture, resource conservation using scientific interventions.
The information and data contained in this report has far reaching scope for effective implementation of watershed programmes and can also be an important tool for works under various other departments and NGOs as well.
Senior Government officials from the Soil and Water Conservation Department were also present on the occasion.
