Influences of land use and climate changes on hydrologic system in the northeastern river basin of Thailand

Abstract

This study was a first attempt to portray the effects of land use and climate changes (CCs) on the hydrologic system in the Lamtakhong Basin in northeastern Thailand, which has been disturbed by various human activities, making it difficult to determine these impacts on hydrologic conditions. The hydrologic Soil and Water Assessment Tool model was set up with land use and soil data of 2002 and observed flow and weather data during 1999–2000. After the model was calibrated and validated against observed flow data during 2001–2009, its land use change scenario with input land use data of 2011 and its CC scenario with input weather data during 2010–2065 were simulated. The results showed that changing land use over the 10-year period had trivial influences on the hydrologic system, whereas changing climate over the 56-year period appeared to affect both water yields and flows. Water scarcity will tend to take place across the Lamtakhong Basin in the near future. Longer periods of severe droughts and floods might occasionally occur, particularly downstream. These findings will be useful for land and water resources managers and policy-makers to manage land and water resources in the river basin.

Assessment of impacts of agricultural and climate change scenarios on watershed water quantity and quality, and crop production

“…This will in turn necessitate substantive conservation efforts, higher than historical levels. Unfortunately, the latest farm bill has both reduced overall conservation funding by almost EUR 4 billion over a 10 year span and reduced the proportion of funding going to land retirement (Stubbs, 2014). Therefore, increased conservation will only occur via novel public-private partnerships or through regulatory drivers.…”

Assessment of impacts of agricultural and climate change scenarios on watershed water quantity and quality, and crop production

“…Liu et al, 2015) and scenarios that reflect hypothetical shifts between various percentages of urban, forest, agricultural and other land use (Zhang et al, 2015(Zhang et al, , 2016Wu et al, 2015). Similar types of combined SWAT climate change/land use change studies have been performed in other regions including Asia (Sayasane et al, 2015;Singkran et al, 2015;Tan et al, 2015), Europe (Serpa et al, 2015;Mehdi et al, 2015b;Guse et al, 2015) and North America (Mehdi et al, 2015a;Neupane and Kumar, 2015;Goldstein and Tarhule, 2015).…”

Modeling Reforestation’s Role in Climate-Proofing Watersheds from Flooding and Soil Erosion

“…Here, in consequence of farm abandonment, there has been widespread natural reforestation since the middle of the nineteenth century [58]. Recently, however, despite the widespread extent of this regional rewilding, changing patterns in large-scale atmospheric circulation, causing a higher severity of rainfall events, have still led to increases in the consequent magnitude of watershed runoff and flows [59] [67]. As well, changes in rainfall amounts are known in at least one case to have had a greater effect on rates of watershed erosion than a complete removal of forests through either commercial logging or wildfires [68].…”