Spatially Explicit Modeling to Evaluate Regional Stream Water Quality

Nitrogen and phosphorus discharge from small agricultural catchments predicted from land use and hydroclimate

“…To evaluate land management effects on nutrient losses, spatial computer models have been developed. The emphasis of the research has shifted from empirical models such as USLE (Wischmeier and Smith, 1978), its modifications MUSLE and RUSLE (EPA, 1992) to more sophisticated simulation models, such as ANSWERS (Beasley et al, 1980), HSPF (Bicknell et al, 1984), AGNPS (Young et al, 1987), PULSE (Bergström et al, 1987), SWAT (Arnold et al, 1993;Santhi et al, 2001;Oeurng et al, 2011;Arnold et al, 2012), HBV-NP (Arheimer and Wittgren, 1994), MONERIS (Behrendt et al, 2000), Riverstrahler (Billen and Garnier, 2000), PolFlow (de Wit, 2001), INCA (Wade et al, 2002), STICS-MODCOU (Ledoux et al, 2007;Beaudoin et al, 2016), TNT2 agro-hydrological model (Ferrant et al, 2013); SPARROW waterquality model of the USGS (Alexander et al, 2007;Schwarz et al, 2011;Preston et al, 2011Preston et al, , 2013García et al, 2016), and HYPE (Lindström et al, 2010;Arheimer et al, 2011). However, land-use managers usually lack high-resolution monitoring data on multiple environmental variables from large areas, such as soil temperature, light, groundwater flow, or water-retention time, to feed the models.…”