Land-use influence on the soil hydrology: An approach in upper Grande River basin, Southeast Brazil

Abstract

Brazil is a large country that depends on the hydroelectricity generation hydropower dams. The Upper Grande River Basin (UGRB) is one of the most important Brazilian hydrological regions in terms of water availability and electric energy production. Therefore, studies of water availability are indispensable for a better and more successful decision making in water resources management in the region. This study objective to approach the land-use influence on the soil hydrology in the Upper Grande River Basin, a strategic headwater basin of southeastern Brazil. This study uses hydrological indicators (baseflow/runoff (BF/R) and overland flow/runoff (OF/R)) extracted from eight watersheds, varying the size and localization in the region, to support the results found. Soil saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ko) was determined in situ using a constant flow permeameter, totaling 224 sampled points. Five machine learning algorithms were compared in their performance to predict Ko (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosting, Linear Regression, Regularization) using terrain attributes as covariates. The tested methods for predicting Ko resulted in a relatively low coefficient of determination (R2) due to the high spatial variability of this soil hydrologic attribute. The hydrological indicator BF/R was sensitive to land-use changes in the watersheds. The greatest Ko values were associated with native forest and the least values area associated with pasture and rupestrian field.

Identifying Covariates to Assess the Spatial Variability of Saturated Soil Hydraulic Conductivity Using Robust Cokriging at the Watershed Scale

“…Forest soils are associated with a higher infiltration capacity (Archer et al 2013;Kurnianto et al 2018;Wood and King 1977) and a lower generation of surface runoff (Germer et al 2010;Kurnianto et al 2018;Liu et al 2018) than soils under other types of vegetation. This occurs in nature due to preferential flows in the soil profile as a result of soil biota activity and higher organic matter content, as reported by Pinto et al (2015), Ma et al (2017), and Pinto et al (2019).…”

“…Several studies have shown that land use systems affect K Sat values and therefore their spatial variation in a watershed (Price et al 2010;Salemi et al 2013;Pinto et al 2019). Therefore, if properly quantified, it is possible to improve K Sat estimates in non-sampled points when used as a covariate in a cokriging interpolation.…”

“…Saturated soil hydraulic conductivity (K Sat ) is a key soil attribute for understanding the soil water movement phenomenon and is therefore one of the main inputs used in hydrological models. Several studies have reported that K Sat values are affected by the variation of pore space geometry (Baiamonte et al 2017), topography (Wang et al 2013), land use (Price et al 2010;Salemi et al 2013;Pinto et al 2019), and scale (Picciafuoco et al 2019). It has also been well documented in the literature that K sat is highly variable in space (Wang et al 2013;Papanicolaou et al 2015;She et al 2017).…”

Evaluation of Soil Hydraulic Properties in Northern and Central Tunisian Soils for Improvement of Hydrological Modelling

“…These factors interact in complex ways, resulting in spatial variability in saturated hydraulic conductivity across different soil types and landscapes with varying intensities across different scales [17][18][19]. According to Libohova et al [20], the success of predictions when modelling hydrological processes depends on the accurate representation of the spatial and temporal variability of soil hydrological attributes and the main external factors [9,21] such as soil water dynamics which is mainly influenced by the natural and anthropogenic processes predominantly at the surface layer [10,[22][23][24][25][26][27]. One can explore various approaches to determine soil hydraulic conductivity.…”

Impact of climate change on monthly streamflow in the Verde River Basin using two hydrological models

“…The upper Rio Grande Basin, located in southern Minas Gerais state, has great relevance in water availability and hydropower production, contributing also to the Furnas hydropower plant reservoir (Pinto et al, 2019;Oliveira et al, 2017). Thus, the investigation of regional variations caused by climate change are important for water-resource management, agricultural and energy production, water availability, and forecasting of flooding and drought (Byun et al, 2019).…”