Simulation of land use impact on erosion and deposition using SIMWE

Example 1.

Simulated water depth, sediment flow rate and net erosion/deposition for the original,  new (sustainable), and computer designed land use, for the time of the year when the agricultural land (brown) is bare and grass cover (green) is well developed.

	Land cover	Water	Sediment flow	Erosion/deposition
A. Traditional land use (21% grass)
B. New sustainable land use  (41% grass)
C. SIMWE based land use  (19% grass)

Comment:  Both B and C hold more water, reduce the max. sediment flow rates and max erosion rates.

Example 2.

Simulated sediment flow rate and net erosion/deposition for a field before and after installation of a protective grassway. If difference in the speed of water flow between the bare field and grassway is large, erosion around the grassway occurs. If this difference is reduced e.g. by increasing the roughness in the bare field, erosion around grassway disappears.

Image table with land use pattern, sediment flow and net erosion/deposition before and after grassway installation

Methods

Water depth, sediment flow and net erosion/deposition pattern for spatially variable land cover conditions were simulated using the distributed, process-based model SIMWE described in the following papers:

• Mitas, L., Mitasova, H., 1998, Distributed erosion modeling for effective erosion prevention Water Resources Research Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 505-516. (abstract)
• Mitas, Helena Mitasova, William M. Brown, Mark Astley, 1996, Interacting fields approach for evolving spatial phenomena: application to erosion simulation for optimized land use. Proc. of the III. Int. Conf. on Integration of Environmental Modeling and GIS, (Santa Fe, NM), by National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, Santa Barbara CA, CDROM and WWW.
• Mitasova, H., Mitas, L., Brown, W. M., Johnston, D., 1997, Multidimensional Soil Erosion/deposition Modeling. PART IVand V: Process based erosion simulation for spatially complex conditions and its applications. Report for USA CERL. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL. Big file (5.7MB), includes lots of animations and graphics illustrating how the model works

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Hohenfels Example
Camp Shelby extension
Court Creek Pilot Watershed
Court Creek Erosion  Example
Simulation of land use impact on erosion and deposition using SIMWE
Interpolation and simulation of terrain development with hedges