ARBA MINCH UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE

DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

WATERSHED MANAGEMENT (M.Sc)

ASSESSMENT OF GULLY EROSION AND SIMULATION OF SEDIMENT YIELD

PEER JOURNAL REVIEW PAPER FOR THE COURSE OF RESEARCH METHOD

SUMBITTED BY: GACH CHIOK CHAN

ID No: PRAS/022/13

SUBMITTED TO: INSTRUCTOR: GEZAHEGN. K (PhD.Cadd)

JULY 2021

ARBA MINCH, ETHIOPIA

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Contents
1. Problems and objectives..........................................................................................................................1
1.1. Problems...........................................................................................................................................1
1.2. Objectives.........................................................................................................................................1
1.3. How to impact /what is research philosophy?...................................................................................1
1.4. Theoretical concepts.........................................................................................................................2
2. Materials and Methods............................................................................................................................3
2.1. Sources of model data description....................................................................................................3
2.1.1. Preparation of model inputs.......................................................................................................3
2.2. Preprocessing and analysis...............................................................................................................4
2.2. Model parameterization....................................................................................................................5
2.3.2. Evaluation of model performance..............................................................................................6

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 1. Problems and objectives
1.1. Problems
 There are several factors for the less effect of the past conservation activities in Ethiopia.
Failure to balance land management interventions with the dynamic nature of land
degradation is the major factor for small-holder farmers to sustain both economic and
environmental issues (Shiferaw et al. 2009). This implies to the soil conservation activities
primarily need to look for identifying drivers and dynamics of a site level gully erosion based
on scientific and systematic ways before taking treatment measure. Because it gives chance
to design suitable and effective gully controlling activities.

 Sediment yield simulation using the SWAT model has not been conducted in watershed.
Moreover, the lack of decision support tools and limitations of data are the main factors that
have significantly hindered research and development in the area.

1.2. Objectives
Objectives are

 To identify drivers, dynamics and effects of gully erosion

1.3. How to impact /what is research philosophy?

The reason why student select because this study well-structured and well explain I hope it can
impacts me on further study for specific area of interest

Besides, there is needs of assessment which mean that there is a demand for a model that

1) Can be used in data scarce areas,

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2) Is already being used by countries/institutes/researchers/universities, so that there is less
capacity building required

4) Is relatively easy to use for novices (unskilled Person or new field of study)

5) Includes erosion modeling which one of main concern as watershed management expert

6) Can be plugged-in as an adapter to the River Basin Decision Support System framework that
is being used by almost all partner states and its Ministries of Water Resources and Environment.

1.4. Theoretical concepts

This peer journal consist of two theoretical conceptual; first part describes how SWAT currently
incorporates sediment deposition processes. This also consists of a theoretical part on sediment
and nutrients processes in river or watershed. The second part describes how SWAT studies are
trying to solve weaknesses on modeling in the sediment and stream flow simulation with SWAT
by improving the model, thereby also listing the reason why the default model was adjusted. The
model accuracy can be used to evaluate how well a model performed in a sub basin area. Their
performances are evaluated and reasoning behind their performance rate is studied. The different
ways to express model accuracy can be normalized for the ratio of RMSE to the standard
deviation of the observations (RSR), the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) and percentage of bias
(PBIAS) according to Table 3-1 (Moriasi et al., 2007).

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 2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Sources of model data description

The basic spatial input datasets used by the model include the digital elevation model (DEM),
land use/cover data, soil data and climatic data.

2.1.1.1. Digital elevation model

The DEM is one of the main inputs of the SWAT model. Topography was defined by a DEM
that describes the elevation of any point in a given area at a specific spatial resolution. A 30 m
grid DEM was downloaded from ASTER (Advanced Space borne Thermal Emission and
Reflection Radiometer) GDEM (Global Digital Elevation Model). The DEM was used to
delineate the boundary of the watershed and analyze the drainage patterns of the land surface
terrain. Terrain parameters such as slope gradient and slope length, and stream network
characteristics such as channel slope, length and width were derived from the DEM.

2.1.1.2. Land use/cover data

The land use of an area is one of the most important factors that affect surface erosion, runoff,
and evapotranspiration in a watershed during simulation (Neitsch et al., 2005). The land use map
of the study area was obtained from the Ministry of Water Resources of Ethiopia

2.1.1.3. Soil data

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The soil textural and physicochemical properties required by the SWAT model include
soil texture, available water content, hydraulic conductivity, bulk density and organic carbon
content for each soil type. These data were obtained from FAO (1998; 2002; 2005) and the
Ministry of Water Resources of Ethiopia (2002). Some of the physical and hydrological
properties of the major soil types of area watershed

2.1.1.4. Weather data

The variable weather data required by the SWAT model driving the hydrological balance as
daily rainfall and minimum and maximum temperatures. These data obtained by author
from a compact disk provided by the National Meteorological Service Agency of Ethiopia and
time series data were collected from five stations and covered a period of 22 years (January 1985
to December 2006).

2.1.1.5. Hydrological data

The observed daily runoff and sediment yield data at the outlet of the watershed (Figure1) from
1985 to 2006 were obtained from the Hydrology Department of the Ministry of Water
Resources of Ethiopia. These data are required for calibration and validation of the SWAT
model.

2.2. Preprocessing and analysis

The Arc SWAT interface was used for the setup and parameterization of the model. A digital
elevation model (DEM) was imported into the SWAT model. A masking polygon (in grid
format) was loaded into the model in order to extract the area of interest, delineate the boundary
of the watershed and digitize the stream networks in the study area. In this study, the minimum
threshold area required to discretize the watershed into sub-basins was selected as 5,000 ha. The

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land use/cover and soil maps of the study area (in grid format) were also imported into the model
and overlaid to obtain a unique combination of land use, soil and slope within the watershed to
be modeled.

In this study, multiple HRUs with 10% land use, 20% soil, and 10% slope thresholds were
used to eliminate minor land uses and soil and slope classes in each sub-basin so that a maximum
of 10 HRUs with unique land use/soil/slope combinations would be created in each sub-basin.

The daily rainfall and daily minimum and maximum temperature data were prepared in the
appropriate file format (as a .dbf database file) required by the model and imported into the
model.

2.2. Model parameterization

According to researcher the parameters used during the calibration process, model was subjected
to adjustments, in order to obtain model results that correspond better to the measured datasets.
Auto-calibration process and the model was calibrated on a monthly basis from January 1987 to
December 1996.

The hydrological component and the erosion component of the model were calibrated
sequentially until the average simulated and measured values were in close agreement.
The procedure for calibrating the model for flow and sediment yields is shown in Figure 1.

The flow was the first output calibrated by adjusting the curve number (CN) parameter because
the results of many studies indicated CN as the most sensitive parameter (Wang et al., 2008).

CN allows the model to modify the moisture condition of the soil to estimate the surface runoff.
The runoff curve numbers (CN) were adjusted within ±10% from the tabulated curve numbers to
reflect the conservation tillage practices and soil residue cover conditions of the watershed.
As SWAT uses MUSLE (Williams, 1975), sediment was calibrated by adjusting the MUSLE
crop cover and the management factor. The C-factor was adjusted to represent the surface cover
better for grazing and agricultural lands. Channel sediment routing variables, such as the linear
factor for calculating the maximum amount of sediment during channel sediment routing

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(SPCON) and the exponential factor for calculating the sediment in the channel sediment routing
(SPEXP), were also adjusted during the calibration.

In the validation process, the model was operated with input parameters set during the
calibration process and the results were compared against an independent set of observed data to
evaluate the performance of model prediction. In this study, the model was validated using data
from January 1997 to December 2006 on a monthly basis.

2.3.2. Evaluation of model performance

In this study, during calibration and validation periods, the goodness-of-fit between the simulated
and measured runoff and sediment yields was evaluated using the coefficient of determination
(R2) and the Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency (ENS; Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970).
The R2 value measures how well the simulated versus observed regression line approaches an
ideal match and ranges from 0 to 1, with a value of 0 indicating no correlation and a value of 1
representing that the predicted dispersion equals the measured dispersion (Kraus et al., 2005).
ENS has been reported in the scientific literature for model simulations of flow and water
quality constituents such as sediment, nitrogen, and phosphorus yields (Moriasis et al., 2007).

It is used to assess the predictive power of hydrological models and indicates how well the plot
of the observed versus simulated values fit the 1:1 line. The closer the model efficiency is to 1,
the more accurate the model is. It is defined by this Equation:

Where ENS = the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of the model; Oi and Si = the observed and
simulated values, respectively; and Oav = the average observed value.

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SWAT developers in Santhi et al. (2001) assumed an acceptable calibration result of R² > 0.6
and ENS > 0.5. Moriasi et al. (2007) also proposed that ENS values should exceed 0.5 in order
for the model results to be judged as satisfactory for hydrological and pollutant loss evaluations
performed on a monthly time step and these values were also considered in the current
study as adequate statistical values for accepting calibration results

Figure 1.Calibration procedures for flow and sediment yields in the SWAT model.