Abstract
The hydration potential of a landscape is an increasingly important attribute in a time of advancing climate change, making its assessment also a matter of some urgency. This study used the landscape ecological approach involving the hydrological balance, in which the soil water retention capacity (SWRC) and landscape water retention capacity (LWRC) are evaluated. To support our assessment of the water retention capacity in the landscape (LWRC), we used a synthetic interconnection of analytical vector layers of selected physical parameters of soil subtypes and secondary landscape structure (SLS) to create homogeneous polygons in the GIS Arc/Map10 computing environment. Selected abiotic and biotic attributes were assigned coefficients using a simple algorithm according to the authors, which were projected into landscape ecological complexes (LEC) in the GIS computer program in the Arc/Map10 program. We used hydrological balance calculations to specify the volumes of water retained in the landscape. The aim is to spatially estimate the retention capacity of the landscape, taking into account the current land use, including historical anti-erosion measures to reduce unwanted water runoff and soil erosion. Using zonal statistics, we achieved the following results. The part of the model area with very low or low LWCR represents 39.91% of the agricultural land used. We recorded a high LWCR on 17.69% of the area, with a predominance of meadows and cultizol cambis and cultizol fluvials. The calculation of the hydrological balance, which represents only 22.9% of atmospheric precipitation, also made a significant contribution to our knowledge of the LWRC.
Highlights
Manifestations of climate change and ongoing land use change in the mountainous regions of the Western Carpathians determine the retention capacity of the soil and landscape, which, on the one hand, can manifest itself in hydrological drought and, on the other hand, can cause risks associated with extreme surface water runoff and floods
We deliberately did not use a vector database of rated soil-ecological units (ABC) [35] for our research, as several inaccuracies arose during its creation, which we partially eliminated by using the digitálny model reliéfu (DMR) (10 × 10 m) model
Given the fact that the direct measurement of hydrological data on soil is very difficult when it comes to capacities [26], it is common to use statistically expressed pedotransfer functions (PTF) for the indirect estimation of hydrolimits
Summary
Manifestations of climate change and ongoing land use change in the mountainous regions of the Western Carpathians determine the retention capacity of the soil and landscape, which, on the one hand, can manifest itself in hydrological drought and, on the other hand, can cause risks associated with extreme surface water runoff and floods. The latter leads to extensive property damage and, Water 2020, 12, 3591; doi:10.3390/w12123591 www.mdpi.com/journal/water. Where soils have a thicker humus layer, the retention areas have a higher ability to prevent large-scale landslides as well as floods, whose occurrence after increased rainfall is becoming more frequent [3]
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