Optimizing the Implementation Plan of Watershed Best Management Practices with Time-varying Effectiveness under Stepwise Investment

Abstract

Optimizing the spatial configuration of diverse best management practices (BMPs) can provide valuable decision-making support for comprehensive watershed management. Most existing methods focus on selecting BMP types and locations but neglect their implementation time or order in management scenarios, which are often investment-restricted. This study proposes a new simulation-optimization framework for determining the implementation plan of BMPs by using the net present value to calculate the economic costs of BMP scenarios and the time-varying effectiveness of BMPs to evaluate the environmental effectiveness of BMP scenarios. The proposed framework was implemented based on a Spatially Explicit Integrated Modeling System and demonstrated in an agricultural watershed case study. This case study optimized the implementation time of four erosion control BMPs in a specific spatial configuration scenario under a 5-year stepwise investment process. The proposed method could effectively provide more feasible BMP scenarios with a lower overall investment burden with only a slight loss of environmental effectiveness. Time-varying BMP effectiveness data should be gathered and incorporated into watershed modeling and scenario optimization to better depict the environmental improvement effects of BMPs over time. The proposed framework was sufficiently flexible to be applied to other technical implementations and extensible to more actual application cases with sufficient BMP data. Overall, this study demonstrated the basic idea of extending the spatial optimization of BMPs to a spatiotemporal level by considering stepwise investment, emphasizing the value of integrating physical geographic processes and anthropogenic influences.

Optimizing the Implementation Plan of Watershed Best Management Practices With Time‐Varying Effectiveness Under Stepwise Investment

“…The Spatially Explicit Integrated Modeling System (SEIMS), which has been developed over the past few years (J. Liu et al, 2016;, was used as the watershed modeling framework to implement this improvement (S. Shen & Zhu, 2022). SEIMS has been successfully utilized in the spatial optimization of BMP scenarios with diverse types of spatial units and spatial configuration knowledge (Qin et al, 2018;Zhu et al, 2021;.…”

“…The improved SEIMS programs and the prepared data are freely available at S. Shen and Zhu (2022). The Youwuzhen watershed spatiotemporal datasets are located in the/SEIMS/data/youwuzhen/data_prepare folder.…”