Assessment of drainage network analysis methods to rank sediment yield hotspots

This paper aims to test different methods used for assessing the indices of sediment yield to identify hotspots and rank sediment yield hotspots. This process includes the assessment of the Entropy Weighting (EW), Fractal Dimension (FD), Slope Length (SL) gradient, and Sediment Connectivity (SC) methods. The indices at different sub-catchment levels were applied in the Ilanlu catchment (Iran) and organized based on five different levels of sediment hazard classes. To assess the performance of sediment hazard mapping, the superimposing methods were used and assessed by the Erosion Potential Model (EPM). The superimposing method showed that 8, 10, 4 and 9 sub-catchments based on the degree of susceptibility obtain the highest results considering the results of FD, EW, SL and SC with an output of EPM model, respectively. The results show that EW and SC can achieve greater performance than FD and SL methods in identifying sediment production hotspots.