Evaluating the Multifunctional Resilience of River Health to Human Service Demand: A Comparison among Fuzzy Logic, Entropy and AHP Based MCDM Models

Abstract

Ecosystem services of river for human beings are guided by harmonious relationship; however over growing human service demands (HSDs) are leading to deteriorate the river health connotation. In this study, an assessment index system of monsoonal quarried river health including twenty indicators consisting of riparian, morphological, hydroecological and social structure were established to detect the multifunctional threshold of river system integrity in respect to HSDs at upper (US), middle (MS), lower segments (LS) of Kangsabati River using fuzzy logic, AHP and entropy based multi-criteria decision matrix (MCDM) methods i.e. vlseKriterijumska optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), simple additive weighing (SAW), complex proportion assessment of alternatives (COPRAS), weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS), technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The results revealed that overall indicators performance is generally healthy in MS, medium health level in US but mostly unhealthy in LS; and AHP and fuzzy MCDM methods assigned as high priority rank to MS, medium rank to US and least rank to LS, while entropy MCDM methods gives highest rank to US, medium rank to MS and least rank to LS, respectively. According to model validation performances, fuzzy and AHP MCDM methods are signified to HSDs, and results are closer to real problems, whereas entropy MCDM methods are rationalized to harmonic relationship of riverine system. With the acceptability of AHP SAW and WASPASS, it can be concluded that over HSDs is main culprit for river health degradation, and research results are identified the sick sites for ecological restoration.