Isolating the impacts of climate change and land use change on decadal streamflow variation: Assessing three complementary approaches

Determining the hydrological responses to climate variability and land use/cover change in the Loess Plateau with the Budyko framework

“…Various methods have been developed to isolate hydrological impacts of land use/cover change from those of climate change (Wang et al, 2013;Wang, 2014;Ahn and Merwade, 2014), which can be classified into following types: (i) paired catchment approach (Brown et al, 2005); (ii) empirically statistical methods (Wei and Zhang, 2010;Zhang et al, 2011); (iii) physically-based hydrological models (Wang et al, 2013;López-Moreno et al, 2014;Serpa et al, 2015;Buendia et al, 2016); (iv) elasticity or sensitivity based method (Schaake, 1990;Sankarasubramanian et al, 2001;Arora, 2002;Roderick and Farquhar, 2011); (v) eco-hydrological approach (Tomer and Schilling, 2009);and (vi) decomposition method (Wang and Hejazi, 2011).…”

“…These methods require long time series of data and generally lack physical meanings. The calibrated physically-based hydrological models such as SWAT (Shi et al, 2013;Serpa et al, 2015), MIKESHE (Wang et al, 2013), RHESSys (López-Moreno et al, 2014) and TETIS (Buendia et al, 2016) are run with one variable parameter while others remain fixed to detect the impacts of climate and land use changes on hydrological responses under various scenarios. Such hydrological models are useful for estimating the effects of climate change and site-specific changes in vegetation on streamflow over different time scales, but they are usually characterized by complicated model structures, large number of input data sets, time consuming and uncertainty in model calibration and validation.…”

“…Human activities can alter the spatial-temporal distribution of streamflow through land use/cover change, reservoir operation, and direct extraction from surface water and groundwater (Wang and Hejazi, 2011;Kim et al, 2013;Xu et al, 2014). With increasing scarcity of water resources, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, the hydrological impacts of climate variability and land use/cover change are drawing increasing attention from hydrological researchers, and decision and policy makers Wang et al, 2013). To manage a watershed efficiently in the face of climate change, it is necessary to understand the combined impacts of land use change and climate change, and also to distinguish the roles that land use/cover change and climate change play in the evolution of hydrological time series (Renner and Bernhofer, 2012;Wang et al, 2013).…”

Nitrogen and phosphorus transformations and balance in a pond-ditch circulation system for rural polluted water treatment

“…In order to improve the accuracy, the calibration procedure should include some test of the internal consistency of the distributed results from subcatchments. Together with a restricted use of calibration, a multisite, multiscale, and multicriteria validation is likely a good way to further constrain distributed models (Andersen et al, 2001;Moussa et al, 2007), which improve the internal runoff simulation accuracy depending on the fitting of simulation data of several points to their corresponding observational data, such as multisite calibration of runoff and groundwater table level in the Grote and the KleineGete basins of Belgium (Feyen et al, 2000); multisite calibration and validation approach tested on the Gardon catchment located in the mountainous Mediterranean zone of southern France using data gathered over a 10-year period for nine internal subcatchments (Moussa et al, 2007); and multisite calibration employing stream runoff data at three stations within the large Chaohe River basin in northern China (Wang et al, 2013).…”

“…In that case, physically based models, which are independent of historical statistics and are able to change the model depending on modification of the specific parameters according to changes in the environmental factors, are necessary in order to provide a more confident prediction. Consequently, predictions employing the MIKE SHE model have become more and more popular in recent years, as in studies of the impact of past and future land-use changes on hydrological processes related to the complex surface-groundwater interactions in the watershed of the Elbow River, covering an area of 1238 km in Alberta (Wijesekara et al, 2014); a simulation study demonstrating how the composition and configuration of land use measures affect discharge at the catchment outlet differently in response to storms of different sizes (Kalantari et al, 2014); an assessment of the respective impacts of land use change and climate change on decadal streamflow through use of three complementary models (Wang et al, 2013); a predction of land use and climate change influence on groundwater and ecosystems at the middle reaches of the Tarim River (Keilholz et al, 2015).…”