Land use changes and sediment yield on a hilly watershed in Central-East Argentina

María Isabel Delgado, Fernanda Julia Gaspari and Eduardo Emilio Kruse
Additional contact information
María Isabel Delgado: Course of Watershed Management, School of Agronomy and Forest Engineering, National University of La Plata, La Plata, Argentina
Fernanda Julia Gaspari: Course of Watershed Management, School of Agronomy and Forest Engineering, National University of La Plata, La Plata, Argentina
Eduardo Emilio Kruse: National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), La Plata, Argentina

Soil and Water Research, 2015, vol. 10, issue 3, 189-197

Abstract: Watershed management strategies need suitable techniques to be available in order to quantify sediment yield, among other relevant issues. The aim of this work was to estimate the sediment yield on a hilly watershed, for two different land use scenarios (years 1966 and 2011) and rainfall events (106 mm and 65.5 mm). The Modified Universal Soil Loss Equation was used to estimate the sediment yield produced by a single rainfall on the watershed of the Belisario Creek, placed south-west of the Buenos Aires province, Argentina. The information was processed using the Geographic Information System Idrisi Taiga®. Modelling the 45-year distant land use scenarios allowed to estimate the high level of degradation that is currently taking place on the watershed. Also, we detected different responses through different areas of the watershed; the same rainfall event in the 2011 land use scenario compared to the 1966 scenario showed a 400% increment in sediment yield in the upper sub-watersheds, together with an almost 100% increment near the sink. Here we propose the urgent need to elaborate a sustainable plan for the watershed of the Belisario Creek, in order to establish action criteria that could help improve natural resources management. The methodology used could be also applied to neighbouring watersheds with similar characteristics in the region.

Keywords: GIS; MUSLE; soil loss; territorial management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swr.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/49/2014-SWR.html (text/html)
http://swr.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/49/2014-SWR.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:caa:jnlswr:v:10:y:2015:i:3:id:49-2014-swr

DOI: 10.17221/49/2014-SWR

Access Statistics for this article

Soil and Water Research is currently edited by Ing. Markéta Knížková, (Executive Editor)

More articles in Soil and Water Research from Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ivo Andrle ().