Hydrological simulation of a small forested catchment under different land use and forest management

Abstract

This paper describes the assessment of the SWAT hydrological model to repro-duce continuous daily streamflow and simulate scenarios of forest management for a small catchment under tropical climate in Aracruz, Brazil. The main land use of the catchment consisted of eucalyptus cultivation. The SWAT pa-rameters were calibrated and validated using daily hydrologic and meteorolog-ical data from 1997 to 2004. The statistical indices of SWAT validation (NS = 0.74, PBIAS =-14.34%, RSR = 0.51) show that SWAT performance was satisfac-tory in this application. Different land use and forest management scenarios were simulated with the aim of assessing their influence over the streamflow. The scenarios were: catchment under eucalyptus cultivation with three different forest managements and catchment under the native forest (Atlantic Rain-forest). The scenarios simulations did not show significant changes in the long-term average streamflow. Minimum, maximum, and average annual stream-flows were higher for eucalyptus scenarios compared to the native forest sce-nario. These results should be carefully applied to other watersheds as they reflect soil, landscape, and climate characteristics, as well as the geographic location, size, and use of water of the plantings and other vegetation.