Simulating a Watershed-Scale Strategy to Mitigate Drought, Flooding, and Sediment Transport in Drylands

Abstract

Drylands today are facing a landscape-scale water storage problem. Throughout the increasingly arid Southwest of the United States, vegetation loss in upland watersheds is leading to floods that scour soils and transport sediment that clogs downstream riparian areas and agricultural infrastructure. The resulting higher flow energies and diminished capacity to infiltrate flood flows are depleting soil water storage across the landscape, negatively impacting agriculture and ecosystems. Land and water managers face challenges to reverse the trends due to the complex interacting social and biogeophysical root causes. Presented here is an integrative system dynamics model that simulates innovative and transformative management scenarios. These scenarios include the natural and hydro-social processes and feedback dynamics critical for achieving long-term mitigation of droughts, flooding, and sediment transport. This model is a component of the Flood Flow Connectivity to the Landscape framework, which integrates spatial and hydrologic process models. Scenarios of support and collaboration for land management innovations are simulated to connect flood flow to the floodplains throughout the watershed to replenish soil storage and shallow groundwater aquifers across regional scales. The results reveal the management policy levers and trade-off balances critical for restoring management and water storage capacity to the system for long-term resilience.

Socio-hydrology with hydrosocial theory: two sides of the same coin?

“…Four articles utilized survey data. Interestingly, 2019 also saw more quantitative methods used than usual, including groundwater modeling (Castilla-Rho et al 2019) and system dynamics (Maxwell et al 2019).…”

Identifying Capabilities and Potentials of System Dynamics in Hydrology and Water Resources as a Promising Modeling Approach for Water Management

“…The capability of any SD model to effectively offer a well-organized, precise, and efficient way to simulate a system relies on identifying the key parameters and feedbacks in the system [10,15,16,32,. Many studies have shown that feedbacks are necessary and pivotal for analyzing, assessing, and managing problems related to water issues [43,47,60,74,80,81,85,88,106]. Overall, models using the SD technique are created by building a causal loop diagram (CLD) and transforming it into a stock-and-flow diagram [22,25,26,34].…”

“…The current literature in SD recognizes major feedback loops in descriptive integrated models of water and hydrology systems [10][11][12]17,39,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62], and it includes topics related to social, economic, and hydrological modeling [77,[81][82][83]. By using descriptive integrated models, scholars and modelers have embraced a comprehensive method that aims to find and describe the feedbacks for different systems, such as ecological, environmental, social, political, hydrological, and economic systems.…”

“…The challenges in hydrological and socioeconomic processes have been overcome by developing a dynamic perception for floodplains and considering them to be associated with human activity. Maxwell et al [81] introduced a comprehensive SD approach for simulating hydrosocio-environmental processes, interactions, and feedbacks for reducing the resulting effects of sediment transport, drought occurrence, and floods risk in an arid environment. A water budget methodology was employed as the cornerstone for the developed model, which simulates groundwater recharge and stormwater reuse and illustrates the strategies needed for managing stormwater runoff and groundwater storage.…”

Effectiveness of Drought Indices in the Assessment of Different Types of Droughts, Managing and Mitigating Their Effects

“…Drought mitigation and preparedness refer to the actions usually undertaken by both governments and societies in advance aiming to reduce potential vulnerabilities in society, economy, and environment (see Figure 2). At the same time, response and recovery are actions taken in reaction to drought events aiming to help people face the effects of drought and restore the pre-drought living conditions of the drought-stricken region [55,128,129].…”