Forecasting land-use change and its impact on the groundwater system of the Kleine Nete catchment, Belgium

Abstract

Abstract. Land-use change and climate change, along with groundwater pumping are frequently indicated to be the main human-induced factors influencing the groundwater system. Up till now, research has mainly been focusing on the effect of the water quality of these human-induced changes on the groundwater system, often neglecting changes in quantity. The focus in this study is on the impact of land-use changes in the near future, from 2000 until 2020, on the groundwater quantity and the general hydrologic balance of a sub-catchment of the Kleine Nete, Belgium. This study tests a new methodology which involves coupling a land-use change model with a water balance model and a groundwater model. The future land-use is modelled with the CLUE-S model. Four scenarios (A1, A2, B1 and B2) based on the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) are used for the land-use modelling. Water balance components, groundwater level and baseflow are simulated using the WetSpass model in conjunction with a MODFLOW groundwater model. Results show that the average recharge slowly decreases for all scenarios, the decreases are 2.9, 1.6, 1.8 and 0.8% for respectively scenario A1, A2, B1 and B2. The predicted reduction in recharge results in a small decrease of the average groundwater level, ranging from 2.5 cm for scenario A1 to 0.9 cm for scenario B2, and a reduction of the total baseflow with maximum 2.3% and minimum 0.7% respectively for scenario A1 and B2. Although these average values do not indicate significant changes for the groundwater system, spatial analysis of the changes shows the changes are concentrated in the neighbourhood of the major cities in the study areas. It is therefore important for spatial managers to take the groundwater system into account for reducing the negative impacts of land-use and climate change as much as possible.

Impact of land use change on groundwater recharge in Guishui River Basin, China

“…The WetSpass model calculates the water balance of a grid cell while considering the fractions of vegetation, bare soil, open water and impervious area; therefore, it provides a good choice for estimation of long-term average spatial patterns of groundwater recharge (Batelaan and De Smedt, 2001;. Applications of the WetSpass model in groundwater recharge estimation can be found in Tilahun andMerkel (2009), Woldeamlak et al (2007), and Dams et al (2008). It has also been applied in China for land use impact analysis (Moiwo, 2006) and groundwater simulation (Moiwo et al, 2010) with good results.…”

Assessing groundwater pollution hazard changes under different socio-economic and environmental scenarios in an agricultural watershed

“…Even though an extensive amount of research concerning land-use impacts on groundwater exists in primary literature (Giacomelli et al, 2001;Batelaan and De Smedt, 2001;Klöcking and Haberlandt, 2002;Batelaan et al, 2003;Scanlon et al, 2005;Dams et al, 2007;Jiang et al, 2008;Singh et al, 2010;Lima et al, 2011a;Khan et al, 2011;Ouyang et al, 2014), the complex interactions between hydrologic and socio-economic factors are yet to be elucidated.…”

“…Analysis of the impact of land-use on the dynamics and quality of groundwater needs the integration of information about characteristics of the surface (topography, permeability, type and thickness) and geological strata, along with the configuration of different types of coverage of the land cover (Arnold and Friedel, 2000). The improvement of land-use change models combined with developments in hydrological models allows for more realistic predictions of future subsurface hydrology (Dams et al, 2007).…”

Modeling vulnerability of groundwater to pollution under future scenarios of climate change and biofuels-related land use change: A case study in North Dakota, USA

“…Elevated grainbased bioethanol demands may lead to expansion of corn production and increased use of nitrogen-based fertilizers (Simpson et al, 2008). As a result, in some locations there could be concomitant, though currently unknown, changes in risks of groundwater pollution (Dams et al, 2007;Graham, 2007).…”