Modelling the hydrological impacts of rural land use change

Abstract

The potential role of rural land use in mitigating flood risk and protecting water supplies continues to be of great interest to regulators and planners. The ability of hydrologists to quantify the impact of rural land use change on the water cycle is however limited and we are not able to provide consistently reliable evidence to support planning and policy decisions. This shortcoming stems mainly from lack of data, but also from lack of modelling methods and tools. Numerous research projects over the last few years have been attempting to address the underlying challenges. This paper describes these challenges, significant areas of progress and modelling innovations, and proposes priorities for further research. The paper is organised into five inter-related subtopics: (1) evidence-based modelling; (2) upscaling to maximise the use of process knowledge and physicsbased models; (3) representing hydrological connectivity in models; (4) uncertainty analysis; and (5) integrated catchment modelling for ecosystem service management. It is concluded that there is room for further advances in hydrological data analysis, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis methods and modelling frameworks, but progress will also depend on continuing and strengthened commitment to long-term monitoring and inter-disciplinarity in defining and delivering land use impacts research.

Understanding flood regime changes in Europe: a state-of-the-art assessment

“…At the field scale, O'Connell et al (2004) and Jackson et al (2008) project potentially large changes in flood volumes and peaks associated with de-stocking, tree planting and drainage management. However, the simulated effects were highly variable depending on when and where the change is implemented (McIntyre et al, 2014). In some specific examples, even the directions of drainage and the location of tree planting within the field made a substantial difference to the change in floods (Jackson et al, 2008).…”

“…This may not always be a good assumption and may be difficult to check due to issues with controlled experiments, short record lengths, the high natural variability and scale problems (DeFries and Eshleman, 2004;Blöschl and Sivapalan, 1995). Consequently, relationships between model parameters and relevant land use characteristics may not be identifiable except in small experimental catchments (Kostka and Holko, 2006;O'Connell et al, 2007;McIntyre and Marshall, 2010;Ewen et al, 2013;McIntyre et al, 2014;Pattison and Lane, 2012).…”

Debates—Perspectives on socio‐hydrology: Modeling flood risk as a public policy problem

“…And, one of the earliest applications of continuous simulation hydrological modeling was to investigate effects of urbanization on stream flows in California [James, 1965]. While representation of agricultural land management remains problematic [McIntyre et al, 2013], simulation methods can, in principle, represent the physical effects of human activities on flood hazard as discussed above.…”

Reliability of lumped hydrological modeling in a semi-arid mountainous catchment facing water-use changes

“…In particular, more research is needed to better separate the effects of rural land-use change from other sources of variability and uncertainty in conceptual catchment models (McIntyre et al, 2014). Future work will focus on improving the estimation of fractional snow-covered areas and the sensitivity of runoff generation components to intense rainfall and protracted droughts.…”