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The construction of dams in rivers can offer many advantages, however the consequences resulting from their failure could result in major damage, including loss of life and property destruction. To mitigate the threats of dam break it is essential to appreciate the characteristics of the potential flood in realistic manner. In this study an approach based on the integration of hydraulic modelling and GIS has been used to assess the risks resulting from a potential failure of Zardezas dam, a concrete dam located in Skikda, in the North East of Algeria. HEC-GeoRAS within GIS was used to extract geometric information from a digital elevation model and then imported into HEC-RAS. Flow simulation of the dam break was performed using HEC-RAS and results were mapped using the GIS. Finally, a flood hazard map based on water depth and flow velocity maps was created in GIS environment. According to this map the potential failure of Zardezas dam will place a large number in people in danger. The present study has shown that Application of Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques in integration with hydraulic modelling can significantly reduce the time and the resources required to forecast potential dam break flood hazard which can play a crucial role in improving both flood disaster management and land use planning downstream of dams.

Soil erosion by water is a major problem that the Northern part of Algeria witnesses nowadays; it reduces: the productivity of agricultural areas due to the loss of lands, and leads to the loss of storage capacity in reservoirs, the deterioration of water quality etc. The aim of this study is to evaluate the soil losses due to water erosion, and to identify the sectors which are potentially sensitive to water erosion in the Bouhamdane watershed, that is located in the northeastern part of Algeria. To this end, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was used. The application of this equation takes into account five parameters, namely the rainfall erosivity, topography, soil erodibility, vegetative cover and erosion control practices. The product of these parameters under GIS using the RUSLE mathematical equation has enabled evaluating an annual average erosion rate for the Bouhamdane watershed of 11.18 t·ha . Based on the estimates of soil loss in each grid cell, a soil erosion risk map with five risk classes was elaborated. The spatial distribution of risk classes was 16% very low, 41% low, 28% moderate, 12% high and 3% very high. Most areas showing high and very high erosion risk occurred in the lower Bouhamdane watershed around Hammam Debagh dam. These areas require adequate erosion control practices to be implemented on a priority basis in order to conserve soil resources and reduce siltation in the reservoir.

In the management of water resources in different hydro-systems it is important to evaluate and predict the sediment load in rivers. It is difficult to obtain an effective and fast estimation of sediment load by artificial neural network without avoiding over-fitting of the training data. The present paper comprises the comparison of a multi-layer perception network once with non-regularized network and the other with regularized network using the Early Stopping technique to estimate and forecast suspended sediment load in the Isser River, upstream of Beni Amran reservoir, northern Algeria. The study was carried out on daily sediment discharge and water discharge data of 30 years (1971–2001). The results of the Back Propagation based models were evaluated in terms of the coefficient of determination (R2) and the root mean square error (RMSE). Results of the comparison indicate that the regularizing ANN using the Early Stopping technique to avoid over-fitting performs better than non-regularized networks, and show that the overtraining in the back propagation occurs because of the complexity of the data introduced to the network.

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It is known that water erosion and their suspended sediments transport, generally in the Maghreb region and particularly in Algeria, record very high values; knowledge of these sediments is a very important step in planning erosion control measures. In this study, we modeled and quantified suspended sediment in the Ressoul wadi, Seybouse basin in northeastern Algeria.The study was carried out at different time scales, during a period of 32 years from 1968/69 to 1999/2000 by establishing regressions between the measured sediment concentration and the water discharge at the watershed outlet. The results obtained by the proposed method indicate that the use of two regressions based on means of discharge classes technique reveals very good estimation of the suspended sediment load in the Ressoul wadi, with an error of 3.04% and a specific average degradation transported to the downstream of the watershed of 316.45 t/km 2 /year in the period of 32 years.