Application of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to predict the impact of alternative management practices on water quality and quantity

Antje Ullrich and Martin Volk

Agricultural Water Management, 2009, vol. 96, issue 8, 1207-1217

Abstract: Alternative land management practices such as conservation or no-tillage, contour farming, terraces, and buffer strips are increasingly used to reduce nonpoint source and water pollution resulting from agricultural activities. Models are useful tools to investigate effects of such management practice alternatives on the watershed level. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the sensitivity of such models to parameters used to represent these conservation practices. Knowledge about the sensitivity to these parameters would help models better simulate the effects of land management. Hence, this paper presents in the first step a sensitivity analysis for conservation management parameters (specifically tillage depth, mechanical soil mixing efficiency, biological soil mixing efficiency, curve number, Manning's roughness coefficient for overland flow, USLE support practice factor, and filter strip width) in the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). With this analysis we aimed to improve model parameterisation and calibration efficiency. In contrast to less sensitive parameters such as tillage depth and mixing efficiency we parameterised sensitive parameters such as curve number values in detail. In the second step the analysis consisted of varying management practices (conventional tillage, conservation tillage, and no-tillage) for different crops (spring barley, winter barley, and sugar beet) and varying operation dates. Results showed that the model is very sensitive to applied crop rotations and in some cases even to small variations of management practices. But the different settings do not have the same sensitivity. Duration of vegetation period and soil cover over time was most sensitive followed by soil cover characteristics of applied crops.

Keywords: SWAT; Tillage; management; practice; Conservation; tillage; Water; balance; Nutrient; Modelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(09)00080-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:agiwat:v:96:y:2009:i:8:p:1207-1217

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().