Comparative Analysis of Bioenergy Crop Impacts on Water Quality Using Static and Dynamic Land Use Change Modeling Approach

Abstract

Researchers and federal and state agency officials have long been interested in evaluating location-specific impact of bioenergy energy crops on water quality for developing policy interventions. This modeling study examines long-term impact of giant miscanthus and switchgrass on water quality in the Cache River Watershed (CRW) in Arkansas, United States. The bioenergy crops were simulated on marginal lands using two variants of a Soil and Watershed Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. The first SWAT variant was developed using a static (single) land-use layer (regular-SWAT) and for the second, a dynamic land-use change feature was used with multiple land use layers (location-SWAT). Results indicated that the regular-SWAT predicted larger losses for sediment, total phosphorus and total nitrogen when compared to location-SWAT at the watershed outlet. The lower predicted losses from location-SWAT were attributed to its ability to vary marginal land area between 3% and 11% during the 20-year modeling period as opposed to the regular-SWAT that used a fixed percentage of marginal land area (8%) throughout the same period. Overall, this study demonstrates that environmental impacts of bioenergy crops were better assessed using the dynamic land-use representation approach, which would eliminate any unintended prediction bias in the model due to the use of a single land use layer.

Assessment of Ecological Flow in Hulan River Basin Utilizing SWAT Model and Diverse Hydrological Approaches

“…Land use data play a pivotal role in developing the SWAT model, as they significantly impact the hydrological mechanisms by which precipitation induces runoff on land surfaces [26][27][28][29]. The land use data utilized in this study were sourced from the Data Platform of Resource and Environment Science and Data Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.resdc.cn, accessed on 21 January 2024).…”

Evaluating the water productivity by Aquacrop model of wheat under irrigation systems and algae

“…During the process of photosynthesis of the plant, sucrose, minerals and hormones are carried using water to complete the production process for crops. In severe water stress cases, the grain yield decreases by the end of the agricultural season, and thus the occurrence of severe water stress is very important to complete the modeling process for field crops (Cotter et al 2003;Bell et al 2007;Sheaffer and Moncada 2008;Singh and Kumar 2017) and other simulation model studies -SWAT model implemented by Leh et al (2018) and Kumar et al (2020).…”