Modelling the impact of rural land use scenarios on water management: a FREEWAT approach to the Bakumivka catchment case study, Ukraine

Abstract

The Bakumivka River’s catchment, Ukraine serves as a case study to the application of FREEWAT to the ground and surface water management. The main objective of the study is to find out the optimal spatial distribution of the water supplied to the farms by modifying the land cover pattern of the catchment. An integrated numerical model was developed to provide quantitative estimates of the water budget components. The model includes four model layers, representing the main hydrostratigraphic units, different types of boundary conditions assigned along the area’s boundaries, major components of the water balance introduced through source and sink layers. It was implemented through the FREEWAT software. Three water management scenarios were developed in order to compare different spatial patterns of land cover and distribution of water within the Bakumivka River’s basin. The scenarios represent continuum from market oriented pattern to environmentally sounding pattern of land cover. The objective of the modeling exercise is to obtain mass balances and maps representing three scenarios of water management. Each map shows distribution of the areas where the water balance is optimal, insufficient (dry) or excessive (wet) for vegetation (land cover) of particular type.The simulation shows that changing spatial land cover pattern is an effective measure to reduce water supply to the farms, however it does not prevent water logging in the areas adjacent to the flood plains and drying on summer stress periods in lands of sandyloam soils. Irrigation should be excluded in the areas with sandy and sandyloam soils. The flood plain with peat bogs despite the high water head in spring and late summer stress periods should be irrigated to prevent peat fires. The intrusion of eco-corridors to the land cover pattern in the catchment is positive from ecological perspective, but could prevent drainage causing water logging in the arable lands.

Agricultural Irrigation Water Requirement and Its Response to Climatic Factors Based on Remote Sensing and Single Crop Coefficient Method

“…With the increase of precipitation, the irrigation water requirement of Maize decreases. This is consistent with the results of studies in the American Corn Belt and the Ukrainian Corn Belt at the same latitude in the "Golden Corn Belt" (Basso et al, 2021;Grodzynskyi et al, 2017), indicating that precipitation had a significant effect on the irrigation water requirement of the crop at all latitudes. The relationship between the minimum The Edf values of the single variable precipitation and daily minimum temperature were greater than 1, indicating that there was a nonlinear relationship between these two climatic factors and irrigation water requirement of Soybean.…”

Transboundary rivers of Ukraine: perspectives for sustainable development and clean water

“…Monitoring results are useful to develop models to quantify trends in river pollution, its causes and effects under global change. Some attempts have been made to this end, but for individual watersheds (Osypov et al;Didovets et al 2017;Grodzynskyi and Svidzinska 2017), scenarios (Boychenko et al 2016;Grodzynskyi and Svidzinska 2017;Calinescu and Zelenko 2017) and pollutants (Osypov et al;Loboda and Bozhok 2016;, Voitenko et al 2018). Large-scale river quality models exist and cover the transboundary rivers of Ukraine (Beusen et al 2015;Van Wijnen et al 2019;Vermeulen et al 2019;Van Vliet et al 2019) (Figure 1).…”

Spatial Data Management and Numerical Modelling: Demonstrating the Application of the QGIS-Integrated FREEWAT Platform at 13 Case Studies for Tackling Groundwater Resource Management

“…The drainage-irrigation system has seriously affected the water regime of this catchment. This caused in turn several environmental issues (e.g., the occurrence of peat fires, dehumidification, wind erosion, loss of biodiversity), which trigger the need for a synergic management of water and land use [81].…”

“…The main objective of FREEWAT application to the Bakumivka river catchment was to assess the optimal spatial distribution of water use, by taking into account changes in the land cover pattern [81]. To this aim, three scenarios allowed to compare different spatial patterns of land cover and water distribution.…”