Evaluation of the Compound Topographic Index (CTI) for the location of gullies in cultivated areas of Córdoba (Spain)

<p>The identification of areas susceptible to gully formation is an objective that has important consequences for erosion control. It allows for the optimization of resources by focusing on prevention and control efforts on the most susceptible areas, avoiding the frequent evolution of ephemeral to permanent gullies. The issue is of great interest in Spanish olive groves, many of which are affected by serious problems of gully erosion.</p><p>Gullies are formed in the swales, which allows the use of topography-based tools to predict their location.</p><p>The Compound Topographic Index (CTI) proposed by Thorne et al. (1986) is calculated for each pixel as an estimate of the flow capacity to cause erosion, as it includes the product of the pixel draining area and its slope. Its application requires the identification of a critical value of the CTI (CTIc), above which the potential areas of gully occurrence will be located. Using historical orthophotos, the gullies observed were digitized for 2011 in the experimental areas called Morente (11 km<sup>2</sup> of traditional olive groves on degraded and poor vertisols) and Matasanos (6 km<sup>2</sup> of intensive olive groves also on vertisols) and nearby area, with cereal crops.</p><p>The objectives of this work are: to identify CTIc values corresponding to cultivated areas in Cordoba, mainly olive groves; to develop and evaluate an application that allows a user without great technical skills to obtain the CTI; to evaluate the capacity of this CTIc to reproduce gullies observed in nearby areas or in different time periods (2005) to establish cause-effect relationships between changes in landuse in this type of phenomenon, using the aforementioned tool.</p><p>Part of the digitized gullies, representative of olive grove areas, were used to obtain the CTIc of each gully, by modifying it until the best reproduction of the gullies observed was achieved, then their average value was taken as CTIc. To calculate the CTI, a 5m resolution DEM was used, obtained from LiDAR PNOA 2014.</p><p>In the framework of the Innolivar project, a desktop GIS application has been developed in a free software environment such as QGIS, which allows the calculation of the CTI. The APET tool (AGNPS Potential Ephemeral Gully Evaluation Tool) recently implemented has helped in the development of this application.</p><p>The CTI calculation by the application, after the determination of the CTIc threshold, serves to identify critical areas from a DEM, which is free and available in many countries. A first qualitative evaluation by visual verification indicates a very good characterization of the gullies. Subsequently, the goodness of fit of the gully position between the digitized gullies and the app-calculated gullies according to the CTIc is evaluated quantitatively by obtaining a binary confusion matrix by lengths. In the Morente area, an error of omission of 29% and of commission of 16% was obtained.</p><p>It can be concluded that the application generated that allows the application of the CTI methodology makes identification of areas susceptible to gully formation possible in an efficient and relatively simple manner, helping to achieve a more sustainable agriculture.</p>

Soil moisture simulation with the WRF-Hydro modeling system by involving a more precise infiltration process module

<p>Soil moisture is an important factor affecting atmospheric processes as well as land surface hydrological processes. The description of the infiltration process greatly influences the accuracy of the soil moisture simulation, but there is still a lack of a consistent theoretical framework for predicting the effective fluxes and parameters that control infiltration in the atmospheric-hydrological modeling system. A coupled simulation study of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) and its terrestrial hydrologic component WRF-Hydro is carried out in two mesoscale watersheds of northern China. An infiltration module that is suitable for convective rainfall with large intensity and mixed runoff generation mechanism is added in WRF-Hydro to replace the original infiltration description. The main principle of the new module is: 1) The grid-based topographic index is used as an indication for the infiltration capacity and the soil water storage capacity across the watersheds; and 2) the infiltration is controlled by the variation of the surface soil moisture during the process of the rain, i.e., the infiltration is in an exponential decline as the increase of the surface soil moisture. Three long-duration rainfall-runoff events during the flood season are selected for this study. WRF runs to provide appropriate meteorological inputs to WRF-Hydro, and the simulated soil moisture results are compared with data from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS). The results show that the added infiltration module, compared to the original, produces more consistent simulations with the observations regarding the spatial replication of the soil moisture and thus overall results in a higher simulation accuracy.</p><p>Keywords: soil moisture, infiltration, WRF-Hydro, topographic index</p>

Using stable isotopes as tracer to investigate hydrological condition and estimate water residence time in a plain region, Chengdu, China

The oxygen and hydrogen isotopic compositions (δ18O and δ2H) were measured on river water and precipitation collected from four sub-catchments within the upper Tuojiang River catchment. δ18O values of river water and precipitation exhibit significant seasonal variations. These seasonal variations are used for estimating the mean residence time (MRT) for four sub-catchments by an exponential model, ranging from 346 to 493 days. The correlation between catchment MRT and mean slope of the catchment (r2 = 0.29) is weak, while the correlations between catchment MRT, catchment area (r2 = 0.79) and topographic index (r2 = 0.98) are strong. These results indicate that topography and catchment area, both control the catchment MRT and the topographic index may be a reliable parameter for estimating the catchment MRT. Moreover, the relationship between land use types and MRT was investigated. The results show that paddy fields (r2 = 0.95) compared to the other land use types may have a greater impact on the MRT of the irrigation-dominated catchment. This study provides a preliminary exploration of the factors affecting MRT in the plain region and a basis for simulating MRT in the future.

Impact on wheat production of anthropic soil erosion by recent gully filling at the Campiña landscape in Southern Spain

<p>            Gully erosion is one of the main drivers of environmental degradation on intensively managed agricultural fields in Southern Spain. Ephemeral and permanent gullies develop after intense rainfall events, which leads to significant loss of arable land. In the study area, productivity is also affected atn gully surroundings since gully filling (by using the top soil scraped from the vicinity of the gully) is a common practice among local farmers.</p><p>            The aim of this communication is to analyze the impact of gully filling practices on wheat production during two growing years (2017 and 2019) in a medium-sized catchment (94 ha) at the Galapagares watershed. The study area is close to the city of Córdoba (Spain) and belongs to the Campiña landscape (rolling landscape on vertic soils). The catchment under study is divided in five subcatchments, two of them not affected by gully filling in the last eight years while in the other three, the soil was scraped and displaced into the gully within the study period (last two years).</p><p>            Firstly, a series of topographic and spatial factors (insolation, topographic index, slope, aspect, drainage area, distance to the gully) and a soil-related variable calculated prior to the growing season (soil color from the Sentinel-2 visible band) were selected as posible explanatory factors for remote sensing-based Vegetation Indexes (VI) derived from Sentinel-2 (the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index - NDVI and Enhanced Vegetation Index - EVI). Both indexes were considered potential proxies for crop yield for 2017 and 2019 campaigns. Furthermore, the differences in VI were compared between potentially affected areas by soil scraping close to gullies and non-affected areas. At last, a field survey on crop production (kg of wheat grain per ha, 15 % moisture) was carried out during the harvest period to determine the relation between vegetation indexes and crop yield.</p><p>            Results show that the most relevant explanatory factors for NDVI and EVI variance were solar irradiation, topographic index, aspect (positively correlated), soil colour (inverse correlation) and distance to the gully (positive correlation), in this order of importance. A general linear model explained 40% of NDVI and 55% of the EVI variances Nevertheless, when gully adjacent (<30m to the gully) and non adjacent (>30m) areas were analyzed separately, significant diferences were detected. Non-adjacent areas presented higher VI values and homogeinity pixelwise. Moreover, the distance to the gully became the second most significant explanatory factor for VI in adjacent areas (with higher VI values for more distant locations), whereas it remained non significant for non-adjacent pixels. In addition, those subcatchments impacted by recent gully filling showed larger variability in VI values before and after the operations as compared to non-affected subcatchments.</p>

Delineation of flood-prone areas using modified topographic index for a river basin

The modified topographic index () based on digital elevation models (DEMs) was employed to delineate flood-prone areas in Mahanadi basin, India. and flood inundation maps were compared to obtain the threshold () beyond which the area is assumed to be inundated by flood and the exponent of the . Scale dependence was also investigated to evaluate the sensitiveness of spatial resolution of the DEMs. DEMs of five resolutions, namely, ASTER global, SRTM, GMTED2010 (30 arc-seconds), GMTED 2010 (15 arc-seconds), and GMTED 2010 (7.5 arc-seconds), were used and ASTER global was preferred due to its low error compared to the remainder. Flood frequency analysis was conducted to obtain the relationship between flood-prone areas and flood magnitude. It was observed that (i) the exponent in the showed little variation, (ii) is reduced with reducing spatial resolution of the DEM, and (iii) error is also reduced as the DEMs' resolution is reduced.

Terrain Effects on the Spatial Variability of Soil Physical and Chemical Properties

Understanding topography effects on soil properties is vital to modelling landscape hydrology and establishing sustainable on-field management practices. This research focuses on an arable area (117 km2) in Southwestern Ethiopia where agricultural fields and bush cover are the dominant land uses. We postulate that adapting either of the soil data resources, coarse resolution FAO-UNESCO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) soil data or pedo-transfer functions (PTFs) is not reliable to indicate future watershed management directions. The FAO-UNESCO data does not account for scale issues and assigns the same soil property at different landscape gradients. The PTFs, on the other hand, do not account for environmental effects and fail to provide all the required data. In this regard, mapping soil property spatial dynamics can help understand landscape physicochemical processes and corresponding land use changes. For this purpose, soil samples were collected across the watershed following a gridded sampling scheme. In areas with heterogeneous topography, soil is spatially variable as influenced by land use and slope. To understand the spatial variation, this research develops indicators, such as topographic index, soil topographic wetness index, elevation, aspect, and slope. Pearson correlation (r), among others, was used to investigate terrain effects on selected soil properties: organic matter (OM), available water content (AWC), sand content (%), clay content (%), silt content (%), electrical conductivity (EC), moist bulk density (MBD), and saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat). The results show that there were statistically significant correlations between elevation-based variables and soil physical properties. Among the variables considered, the ‘r’ value between topographic index and soil attributes (i.e., OM, EC, AWC, sand, clay, silt, and Ksat) were 0.66, 0.5, 0.7, 0.55, 0.62, 0.4, and 0.66, respectively. In conclusion, while understanding topography effects on soil properties is vital, implementing either FAO-UNESCO or PTFs soil data do not provide appropriate information pertaining to scale issues.

A topographic index explaining hydrological similarity by accounting for the joint controls of runoff formation

Surface topography is an important source of information about the functioning and form of a hydrological landscape. Because of its key role in explaining hydrological processes and structures, and also because of its wide availability at good resolution in the form of digital elevation models (DEMs), it is frequently used to inform hydrological analyses. Not surprisingly, several hydrological indices and models have been proposed for linking geomorphic properties of a landscape with its hydrological functioning; a widely used example is the “height above the nearest drainage” (HAND) index. From an energy-centered perspective HAND reflects the gravitational potential energy of a given unit mass of water located on a hillslope, with the reference level set to the elevation of the nearest corresponding river. Given that potential energy differences are the main drivers for runoff generation, HAND distributions provide important proxies to explain runoff generation in catchments. However, as expressed by the second law of thermodynamics, the driver of a flux explains only one aspect of the runoff generation mechanism, with the driving potential of every flux being depleted via entropy production and dissipative energy loss. In fact, such losses dominate when rainfall becomes runoff, and only a tiny portion of the driving potential energy is actually transformed into the kinetic energy of streamflow. In recognition of this, we derive a topographic index called reduced dissipation per unit length index (rDUNE) by reinterpreting and enhancing HAND following a straightforward thermodynamic argumentation. We compare rDUNE with HAND, and with the frequently used topographic wetness index (TWI), and show that rDUNE provides stronger discrimination of catchments into groups that are similar with respect to their dominant runoff processes. Our analysis indicates that accounting for both the driver and resistance aspects of flux generation provides a promising approach for linking the architecture of a system with its functioning and is hence an appropriate basis for developing similarity indices in hydrology.

A topographic index explaining hydrological similarity by accounting for the joint controls of runoff formation

Surface topography is an important source of information about the functioning and form of a hydrological landscape. Because of its key role in explaining hydrological processes and structures, and also because of its wide availability at good resolution in the form of digital elevation models (DEM), it is frequently used to inform hydrological analyses. Not surprisingly, several hydrological indices and models have been proposed to link geomorphic properties of a landscape with its hydrological functioning; a widely used example is the Height Above the Nearest Drainage (HAND) index. From an energy-centered perspective HAND reflects the gravitational potential energy of a given unit mass of water located on a hillslope, with the reference level set to the elevation of the nearest corresponding river. Given that potential energy differences are the main drivers for runoff generation, HAND distributions provide important proxies to explain runoff generation in catchments. However, as expressed by the second law of thermodynamics, the driver of a flux explains only one aspect of the runoff generation mechanism, with the driving potential of every flux being depleted via entropy production and dissipative energy loss. In fact, such losses dominate runoff generation in a catchment, and only a tiny portion of the driving potential energy is actually transformed into the kinetic energy of streamflow. In recognition of this, we derive a new topographic index named dissipation per unit length (DUNE) by re-interpreting and enhancing the HAND index. We compare DUNE with HAND, and with the topographic wetness index (TWI), and show that DUNE provides stronger discrimination of catchments into groups that are similar with respect to runoff generation. Our analysis indicates that accounting for both the driver and resistance aspects of flux generation provides a promising approach to linking the architecture of a system with its functioning.