Effects of Water Management Strategies on Water Balance in a Water Scarce Region: A Case Study in Beijing by a Holistic Model

Abstract

Irrigation is facing increasing pressure from other competitive water users to reduce water consumption in a water scarce region. Based on the Basin-wide Holistic Integrated Water Assessment (BHIWA) model, the effects of water management strategies on water balance in the dry regions of North China were analyzed. The results show that, with the decrease of irrigation water supply reliability (IWSR) and the increase of irrigation water use efficiency (WUE), irrigation water use decreased significantly, leading to reduced agriculture water consumption, and sustained ground water levels. Compared with the increase of WUE, the decrease of IWSR contributes more to reducing irrigation water consumption and protecting groundwater. Sensitivity tests show that among various water cycle components, irrigation water use is most sensitive to changes, followed by agriculture water consumption, and then groundwater level. Reducing IWSR is an effective strategy to reduce irrigation water consumption and promote sustainable water resources management, which could be the support of basic data and theory for regional water resources planning.

The Research on Optimization of Agricultural Planting Structure in Minqin Basin under Water-saving Mode

“…(6) The constraint on labor resource, requiring that the total labor for farming in the season of crop production should be less than or equal to the total labor that can be provided; (7) The constraint on policy, requiring, for example, per capita food targets, residents living standards shall meet the annual requirement on planning level, etc.…”

“…Water resource constraints are the most powerful in optimizing the regional planting industry structure. The irrigation volume of all planted crops should not exceed the amount of irrigation water that the Minqin Basin can provide,Hence, It is crucial consider the water resource constraints(m 3 ) [7,8].…”

Modeling Probabilistic-Based Reliability Analysis for Irrigation Water Supply Due to Uncertainties in Hydrological and Irrigation Factors

“…In the process of distributing the water volume in the irrigation system comprised of the sub-zones, including their channel-based canals, the canal-based water supplies are determined according to the corresponding planned water demands and the capacity of the water gages in terms of the maximum delivered water (i.e., water intake). Since the above planned water demand changes with the type of crop and corresponding growth seasons, it is highly likely to be uncertain; additionally, the maximum delivered water at the water gates is generally determined based on the operating rules and strategies [17]; thus, the corresponding variations might be induced by the uncertainties on the operation of intakes and offtakes [25]. By doing so, the variations regarding the maximum delivered water of the gates may affect the reliability of the irrigation water allocation.…”

“…In general, the reliability analysis is commonly carried out to evaluate the uncertainty factors' effect on the irrigation water supply. The resulting irrigation water supply reliability is widely represented in terms of the ratio of the water supply to the water demand (called the reliability index) [12,[15][16][17][18][19]. Therefore, a number of reliability analysis models have been proposed to pay attention to the reliability index, equal to the ratio of the irrigation water supply to the corresponding water demands.…”

Variation in actual evapotranspiration following changes in climate and vegetation cover during an ecological restoration period (2000–2015) in the Loess Plateau, China

“…As a major variable of the global hydrological cycle and major component of the surface energy balance, ET a exerts a significant influence over water allocation (Wu et al, 2018). The use of ET a to evaluate regional water consumption in water resource management have proven effective in many studies (Anderson et al, 2012;Ding et al, 2015;Li et al, 2017a;Peng et al, 2016) and the results manifest that use of ET a as a monitoring indicator of water resource is feasible.…”