Abstract:In South Korea, since small forest catchments are located upstream of most river basins, the baseflow from these catchments is important for a clean water supply to downstream areas. Baseflow recession analysis is widely recognized as a valuable tool for estimating the baseflow component of the stream hydrograph. However, few studies have applied this tool to small forest catchments. So, this study was conducted to assess the applicability of the recession analysis methods proposed in previous studies. The data used were long-term rainfall-runoff data from 1982 to 2011 in the Gwangneung coniferous (GC) and deciduous (GD) forest catchment in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. For the applicability assessment, six recession constant estimation methods, which were used by previous studies, were selected. The recession constants of the GC and GD catchments were calculated, and applicability assessments were conducted by comparing the recession predictions and baseflow separations. As a result, the recession constants for GC and GD were 0.8480 and 0.9235, respectively. This clear difference may be due to the different forest cover in each area. The correlation regression line, AR(1) model, and the Vogel and Kroll method showed lower error rates and appropriate baseflow indexes compared with other methods.

Forests and water are closely related to each other. Thus, forest management is crucial for the sustainable clean water supply. Forest thinning is one of the fundamental forest management practices, as it can change runoff by controlling the density of trees. In this study, the effect of forest thinning on long-term runoff changes was evaluated, based on the long-term rainfall-runoff data of a coniferous plantation forest catchment in Korea. From the double mass curve and Pettitt’s test, a statistically significant increase in runoff rates was identified. A simple linear regression model of the double mass curve can successfully quantify the net effect of forest thinning on the runoff increase. Furthermore, it was also confirmed that forest thinning does not significantly increase the risk of flooding. About ten years after forest thinning, crown closure rates of the coniferous plantation forest reached a level similar to the pre-thinning period, and runoff rates returned to the pre-thinning level, due to forest growth. As a result of this study, a proposed direction for Korea’s forest policy for water resource management is presented for the future.

The saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is one of the most important soil properties for many hydrological simulation models. Especially in South Korea, analyzing the Ks of the forest soil is essential for understanding the water cycle throughout the country, because forests cover almost two-thirds of the whole country. However, few studies have focused on the forest soil in the temperate climate zone on a nationwide scale. In this study, 1456 forest soil samples were collected throughout South Korea and pedo-transfer functions employed to predict the Ks were developed. The non-linearities of the soil and topographic features were considered with the pretreatment of variables, and the variance inflation factor was used for treating the multicollinearity problem. The forest stand and site characteristics were also categorized by an ANOVA and post hoc test due to their diversity. As a result, the Ks values were different for various forest stands and site characteristics, which was statistically significant. Additionally, the model performance was higher when both soil properties and topographic features were considered. The sensitivity analysis showed that the Ks was highly affected by the bulk density, sand fraction, slope, and upper catchment area. Therefore, the topographic features were as important in predicting the Ks as the soil properties of the forest soil.

This study was carried out to investigate the characteristics of suspended solid concentration in small forest watershed, Hwacheon, Gangwondo. For five rainfall events from July 2013 to August 2013, rainfall, discharge, and suspended solid load has been measured. The results showed that the fist flush effect was observed for suspended solid in each rainfall event, sediment rating curve was obtained with     at rising limb and     at falling limb, and EMC (event mean concentration) of suspended solid was calculated to 9.4 mg/L. EMC was compared to the values from the watershed that has various land use types and EMC from forest watershed was much lower that from the crop, paddy or low covered forest watershed.

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